


Sea Shanties for Thots

by Anonymous



Category: Homestuck
Genre: (I did ask permission), Alternate Universe - Pirate, Artistic Liberties - Definition of a Sea Shanty, Artistic Liberties - Ship Anatomy, Body Image, Eventual Happy Ending, Explicit Descriptions of Fishing, Explicit Feelings Talk, Explicit Sexual Content, F/F, Familial Abuse, Found Family, Gen, M/M, Plot Shenanigans, Sea Shanties, Songs Now Embedded For Extra Songing!, Unofficial Sequel
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-01-11
Updated: 2020-07-20
Packaged: 2021-02-27 03:18:11
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 16
Words: 202,700
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22210135
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/
Summary: Jake English has never done anything wrong, ever, in his life, if you don't count literally all that stuff from the first installment of oxfordRoulette's diegetic-musical-cum-found-family-pirate-AU. Luckily, that was in the last story, and he is completely better now in all respects. None of that nonsense is a thing anymore and it will not be relevant at all! Surrounded by friends and allies, with a very cool piratey boyfriend and a hold full of treasure from his recently decimated country, he's got everything a fellow could want.What will he do?Befriend an octopus god. Learn to fish. Kick back. Take it easy. Kiss his boyfriend a lot. Open a jewelry company? Pursue immortality. Confront his past. Embrace his future. Maybe save the world. One thing's for sure: there will be a lot of songs involved.
Relationships: Jake English & Aradia Megido, Jake English & Kanaya Maryam, Jake English & Rose Lalonde, Jake English & Roxy Lalonde, Jake English/Dirk Strider, Rose Lalonde/Kanaya Maryam
Comments: 84
Kudos: 93
Collections: Anonymous





	1. For the Pirate Gods (or, angering deities as a path to friendship)

**Author's Note:**

  * Inspired by [The Four Kings, the God Thief, and the Black Diamond Pirates](https://archiveofourown.org/works/17886581) by [oxfordRoulette](https://archiveofourown.org/users/oxfordRoulette/pseuds/oxfordRoulette). 



“What’s got you tied up out here?” you ask, settling down beside Dirk on the deck. This is a fairly novel seated position for you, a functional but tragically squat and compressive posture, which Roxy describes as ‘criss-cross applesauce’. Easy on your back and knees, in contrast with most of your more typical spatial orientation, and doesn't require a chair.

There is something so comical about sitting on the ground, or the deck, which is as close to 'ground' as you really get while rolling on the open sea, sailing back to the Velvet Court. You haven't done it on purpose in well over a decade. Not at all appropriate for a prince.

But, well, you're not one of those anymore. You are this, now, whatever this is, what you _are_ is an ongoing process of feeling out the role that exists for you, here, on the _Black Diamond II_ after more or less burning down her predecessor yourself, whoops. You didn't light the torch, but you might as well have, really. There was a whole story back there in Aetria, your ancestral home, well over a week's sail behind you and more vanishingly distant with every passing day. A whole story which doesn't matter anymore, because you are here, now, doing this, being a pirate. Squatting your way into a silly position on the black-finished boards of the top deck.

Criss-cross applesauce. You say that, now. A fresh batch of words that you had never thought before in that particular order! What a marvel. You've learned so much already, most importantly, so far as sitting goes, that _any_ kind of sitting beats standing when your knee aches from smashing it when the groundswell jolted you against the gunwale as you were _attempting_ to help fold and store the spare sailcloth.

It’s a great relief just to no longer be putting weight on it.

You’ve hardly whined about that particular injury at all, and for now, you’re calling that an absolute win. So long as you can keep _doing stuff_ , you’re not about to complain too fervently! It’s going to be a real job, earning back the trust of all Dirk’s piratey crew members, finagling your way into… well, trying to care about them yourself for reasons other that ‘Dirk sure seems to, and would certainly prefer to believe that you did’, but you’re pretty sure that your best bet is going to be… participating.

Relentlessly participating.

This also, of course, helps to take your mind off of what you left behind, questions that linger about Janey and her efforts to clean up the capital city after its decimation and your abrupt abdication of being-prince-of-the-place, horror at the prospect of acknowledging that mother is dead, truly _gone_.

You really are nothing, here, outside of what Dirk seems convinced that you are. Well suited for piracy, people keep saying, mostly after insulting your capacity for 'empathy' and 'human decency' and 'giving a shit about anything beyond your own immediate comfort', which, well, that's fair, you suppose. Better to stop fighting it if basically everyone, Gods and Queens and Dirk, most important out of all of those people, are in accord. Some things, you simply must accept as 'probably true' and then springboard off them to better stuff, recognizing that you are probably just not smart enough to understand.

The point is, the more things you do, the more things you can sort of be, even if the new roles you’re picking up usually come with modifiers like ‘novice’ and ‘utterly incompetent’. ‘Tragically inept sail-folder’, though, is better than nothing. Anything is better than nothing. And you are a whole lot of nothing, for now, but working on it. Working your fingers to the bone on it, the urgent task of 'being something'.

As much as you’ve already bollocksed things up, it’s all there is to do, and that’s that on that.

So here you are. And here Dirk is, the most jaw-droppingly handsome, dashing, utterly wonderful person alive. He is never more lovely than when his brow is furrowed in concentration, as it is now, his clever fingers skating over a long braided line, pausing occasionally to do something with it. He's dressed in some of the Aetrian garb stolen from the capital city to be used as deck clothes, far too fine for the purpose - this particular shirt and trousers probably belonged to some poor trouserless nobleman, based on the flouncy cut, the subtle pearl beading around the neck, and the small, relatively useless pockets.

Aetrian men's fashion, even the most utilitarian of it, does leave a lot to be desired.

At your question, he looks up from an enormous pile of rope, continuing to pull it with deliberate intent between his hands, stretching out to his full impressive wingspan, and neatly coiling the results. You note a series of tick marks of some sort, smaller scraps of twine bound tightly at uniform points along the main rope as if to delineate the segments in some way.

“Protein acquisition duty,” he explains, pausing to gesture at the finished pile of rope. “Didn’t bring our fishing lines off the Diamond before she, y’know.”

“Burned away to nothing?” you supply helpfully.

“You actually _are_ allowed to LARP feeling bad about that for a few more weeks, dude,” he sighs. “But seriously, I can feel the hypertension coming on from the sheer volume of salt mutton we’ve been eating lately. Roxy does a fucking sick seared halibut on top of pickled cabbage and zucchini. Doesn’t sound like it should work as well as it does, but I’ve got a hankering and I really have to get my macros back in order.”

“Oh,” you say, frowning at the line as he resumes counting through it length by length, pausing afresh to bind a new length of marking twine to the rope before he continues again. “Can I, uh, offer you a hand or two?”

“Keep me company, ‘less Karkat’s got you scheduled doing something else,” Dirk suggests.

Your confounded knees are more than proof enough that you’ve finished your deck work for the afternoon. It’s taking long enough, but you’re developing a method when it comes to methodically scrubbing the deck free of filth and salt scum. It no longer takes so long that the sun has set before you’ve finished, and you no longer have to invest quite so much energy in suppressing the urge to make pitiful noises until someone helps you, which is a crapshoot anyway in terms of the reliability of the strategy. Alas!

Having pointed all of this out to Dirk, he smiles fondly and makes appropriately sympathetic noises at your insistence that your knees are more bruise than undamaged flesh, and isn’t that a damned tragedy?

“So that’s a no,” he finally interrupts, ceasing in his work again. “You’re not busy.”

“No, that’s the gist of it, I s’pose,” you admit.

“Well, let me try to lay down what I’m doing,” he explains. “This’ll be an hour or two more. See, for our last set of gear, we got ahold of a fathom measure and I figured out how many Dirkspan lengths that converts to. Sollux has a depth chart stacked up in there somewhere, and certain spots we’ve figured out, mostly through trial and error, are better than others for fishing, so I had gear set up for different depth ranges. We’re coming up on a good spot that’s about three hundred fathoms, and the maximum where we can easily pull shit up is in the neighborhood of four hundred, so I’m marking up a set of four hundred fathom lines that’ll be multipurpose once they’re done. It stores easy, reliably brings in food, and once you’ve made ‘em, you never have to do this shit again.”

“Ideally, I would imagine,” you agree, your heart sinking slightly.

Ideally, someone might ensure that his ship and all of his treasured… supplies, and knives and whatnot, he really does love his knives… did not burn down in the first place, necessitating all of this hullabaloo for a couple of fish!

Oh, you really aren’t a fan of your actions having consequences, especially ones that make Dirk look so terribly morose as he assesses the pile of uncoiled rope still waiting to be processed through behind him.

With an even more pronounced sinking feeling, you do the mental legwork to get from one Dirk Fact (you have cultivated a small arsenal of these, with questionable utility but a significant amount of personal satisfaction!) to another.

“Dirk,” you say, horror dawning on you. “You shouldn’t have to be doing the fishing, I mean, if that’s going to be… a source of unpleasant recollections about your mysterious and storied past in the industry! The gender industry as much as the fishing industry! Gosh almighty, hand that over, you really must let me… do _something_.”

He raises an eyebrow at you as you try to wrest the rope from his grip, not with any particular assertiveness, and remember abruptly that he is much, much stronger than you are. For now. For _now_ , so help you! You don’t know a lot about the mechanics of musculature, beyond its various pleasurable applications, but a week or two more working on the blinkin’ deck, scrubbing your hands ragged, you’re at least 80% certain that you’ll be able to bench press him.

Yes, that’s a good thought, he’s going to be so impressed with you.

For now, you huff out a sigh and release your ineffective grip as he laughs.

“We’d need to convert to Jakespans, first of all, and I’m not dragging Sollux out to do that math without a damned good reason.”

You cross your arms and try not to pout, failing resoundingly. It’s hard to stop when it _works_ , that’s the problem, really!

“I’ll do the calculations, obviously," you insist. "Unlike most of the present company, I did learn basic arithmetic and all, having actually attended school.”

It’s beside the point what kind of school you attended. _Sometimes_ math was involved, and there is no way in creation you’re going to concede to being less educated than a career pirate. That’s utterly ridiculous. An untenable contradiction.

Dirk snorts, already back to coiling rope, tying on another fathom marker as you watch, transfixed by the capability of his calloused hands.

“Here,” he says. “You can set the markers. Each one indicates twenty-one Dirkspans, or twenty fathoms. The name is non-negotiable. If half the world can’t stop using imperial, I get to have my fun.”

You nod. That seems fair. As he counts his way through, you watch the way his lips move over the numbers, the way his forehead furrows in concentration. You find a fairly clean handkerchief that you’ve been saving - it’s a tremendous relief, after a gruelingly unpleasant several-hours of work, to dampen a properly un-crusty bit of cloth and wipe down your face.

And yet, you are a man in love.

You lean in and gently pat the sweat from his brow before it can drip into his eyes, a function of the hours he’s spent out here doing god-knows-what, most likely hunched over this project, since further down the line, you can see a whole mess of fancy knotting that seems apt to keep a set of four hooks in place.

He smiles at you.

“So, is the goal to make this take twice as long - I’m fucking with you, christ. Wow. Hey, I’ve got an idea, screw the fish, let’s clean up and -”

“Dirk,” you say, very seriously. “I’m something of an expert on these sorts of matters, and I must advise against screwing the fish.”

“Actually,” he begins.

“Nope, not touching that story! Not unless Vriska’s feeling generous with that rum of hers,” you interrupt hastily. “Altogether too sober to hear it! Please, my good sir, teach me the ways of this knot.”

“So interspecies is a no. Interesting - joke, a _joke_ , I’m - wow, I’m not knockin’ em out of the park this afternoon, am I.”

“I’m a frayed knot,” you say, feeling like possibly the cleverest human being alive as you pick up one of the scraps of material he’s been using for markers, waggling it emphatically, and he laughs in disbelief. “Oldest one in the book, mate. Now come along, time to make me suck less at something!”

It’s wildly flattering, though you concede it can certainly get old fast in the wrong context, how much utter joy Dirk seems to take in fixing you. There are an awful lot of things about you that need fixing, you gather. Some he has explicitly identified, others you've figured out for yourself through pure conjecture. In this case, the clear personal deficit up for repair is ‘not knowing what in the blue blazes an ‘icicle hitch’ is’, which is, at least in theory, a problem with an easy fix.

In theory.

In practice, it would be too generous to say that teaching you makes the task take twice as long than it otherwise might have. The sun is setting by the time the third line is almost finished, and Dirk’s answers have been getting shorter and his corrections more brusque, and you know you’ve just about worn out his patience, which is something of a talent of yours. He doesn't have a whole lot of it to begin with, kind of not his thing, and usually you're better at working around that. But there's no way to wiggle-worm your way out of doing it, once you've gotten started.

By the end, though, you’re sort of doing it right. Miracle of miracles. Sort of. You have to go back and fix one unraveled hitch, where you didn’t quite tuck the end properly. It reminds you a bit of macrame, which you were never good with, weaving-y stuff is simply not your art, but for linework, the knot-tying is substantially more difficult and high-stakes!

You don't do well with high-stakes, is part of the problem. Hands get shaky, though you've got strategies to deal with that, after a few months working with Aradia on all manner of stitching and suturing and _live_ corpse modification, which is to say, doctoring stuff. You're not the worst at any of that, but not the best, either. And your hands are mostly still enough, even under pressure, to knot the rope.

Lying still gets you, shake-wise. You aren't likely to cure yourself of that particular tell any time soon; it's clung to you for decades, like meat on a stewbone, defying your best efforts to scrape it away. So you have to be careful.

Being careful with your words, your actions, your speech, all that stuff, to elicit the desired effect... luckily, that's something you're quite good at. But you’re starting to doubt that there’s any boat-related task at which you possess the kind of aptitude you do for matters of flesh and flattery.

Which is a shame, because this is your life now. Not that. And working for every damned little thing, tying knots with your thumbpad sore and a little bloody from a knife sharpening misadventure (in the plays, it always seems as though they’re testing the edge with the meat of the thumb! How were you supposed to know?) and your knuckles cracked and bleeding from deck-swabbing duty, this is just part and parcel of the whole business of piracy.

You’re certain you’ll be a lot better at killing people than knot tying - hey, there’s another one you’ve been pretty good at so far, in your experience! - and Dirk replies darkly that, if you continue _helping_ him with the lines for a few more hours, there’ll be no hope of getting him back from the Dead King this time, so congrats on combining those two skills.

To be frank, you think that ‘annoying your beloved boyfriend to death in an effort to be a more constructive community member’ might be a story insane enough to at least gain some sort of Dead-King-favor, knowing what you do about the gent, but simultaneously knowing all the _other_ business of yours to which he’s recently been privy, the embarrassingly failed seduction-of-death-itself, the kidnapping his siblings and... probably some other stuff, you've done a lot of unscrupulous mucking about, of late... you’re not willing to push your luck. Maybe in a few years when his recollections of you are a tad less fresh.

Three perfect coils of fishing line, at long last, sit piled before you in the waning sunlight, regardless of how you got here.

Dirk slumps back against the deck with a groan.

“Jake,” he says blearily. “I fucking hate making fishing gear. I hate it so much. I’d rather cut off all my fingers than tie another _fucking_ icicle hitch.”

“Hmm,” you say vaguely, picking up a few more scraps of the spare twine that’s been serving as a marker. It’s dyed burgundy. Carefully, you loop and tuck your way through a last effort. It’s a bit more challenging with the small size of the anchor piece, but you… you do it!

“Holy shit,” Dirk says, sitting up - damn him and damn his strikingly impressive abdominal muscles, the bastard doesn’t even use his arms - and taking the knotted bit of twine.

“Here is my solemn vow,” you announce, positively gleeful, after all of that _effort_. “You will never tie another icicle hitch, so long as I’m around. I have _two_ skills now, thank you very much, and I offer this one to your service.”

“Do it again,” he says.

You cluck your tongue disapprovingly, but tie two fresh pieces together as he watches. It holds.

“Not too shabby, eh?” you announce, depositing this one, too, in his open palms.

“As un-shabby as literally anything has ever been, I’ve got to be real with you, dude.”

Your heart feels warm and full. You want to tie several more knots and receive compliments for doing so. That sounds like the best possible way to spend time. Dirk relaxes on the deck, smiling up at you.

“Whoever scrubbed the shit out of this thing did a fucking killer job, too,” he adds.

“Flatterer,” you say accusingly.

It is somewhat possible that the amount that you are blushing and the fact that you are actually seriously considering making more useless knots in an effort to impress him undermines the weight of the accusation. It's taken a toll on you, his clear annoyance at your thick-headedness and difficulty with the knot, and you'd really like to hear him say some nice things about you to make up for it.

“Remind me of this the next time I’m bitching at you for not getting something,” he sighs.

“Yeah, well, I understand. It must be maddening being so good at everything all the time, immediately, and then discovering that the rest of us aren’t nearly so competent!”

Your back is starting to hurt. When you scootch over to his side and slump against the hull, you realize that ‘sore’ is inadequate to describe the consequences of hunching over your work for so many hours. Mother would skin you alive for your shitty posture. There’s a train of thought you’re not exactly itching to grab a bindle stick and hop on, and yet you can feel yourself zoning out, paying too much and too little attention to the grain of the deck...

“Hey. Hey, Jake,” Dirk stage-whispers. “Handjobs.”

Involuntarily, you snort out a supremely unattractive laugh - drat! - and return to inhabiting your body, aching fucking shoulders and all.

“Flat surface helps,” Dirk comments. “C’mon, lay down, promise, I’m fuckin’ onto something here.”

Flopping inelegantly next to him, too tired to do much else of anything, you find that, as semi-usual, he is correct. Your spine feels about a million times less freakishly compressed, and this time the noise that slips out, unbidden, is a sigh of relief.

“Oh, that’s awful nice,” you say, flexing your glutes and feeling half the vertebrae of your lower back crack into place.

This far towards the bow, your work has been occurring in relative isolation - Aradia stopped by to offer her assistance, and Dirk made a truly herculean effort to respond as though one untrained person’s ‘help’ wasn’t already steering him at on a top-speed collision course towards a mental breakdown, but she and Feferi were doing their own linework and presumably pestering Equius at the wheel. Roxy came out to check on you upon ringing the dinner bell, and you apologized on both of your behalfs, especially your own, lest Dirk say something he regret at the observation that no halibut would yet be forthcoming. Nepeta, previously on watch, has traded out with Karkat, who almost certainly wants nothing to do with either of you.

With this in mind, you shift closer to Dirk, resting your head against his chest and looking up at the slow-darkening sky. The stars aren’t out yet. While the boat is rocking gently on the waves, propelled forward at a reasonable speed by the wind filling out its sails, it’s still and quiet here.

“I should kiss your knees,” he says blearily. “Makes shit heal faster. S’science is what it is.”

You prop yourself up on one arm, inspecting his expression. Remarkably, Dirk looks even more exhausted than you do. You wonder if your work and the good food to which you’ve been treated so far has made you Strong enough to carry him.

With near-scientific curiosity, you take hold of his arm and check.

“If you’re trying to kill me, could you speed it up? I had first watch this morning, dude, I’m a little beat.”

A little beat indeed! He looks as though he hasn’t slept in about a week, and you suppose you haven’t been helping, all paw-y and insistent as you can be, him mostly helpless before your utterly _mad_ seduction skills. This is on you. Oh dear. No one expects you to wake up early for watch - that’d be a maritime catastrophe in the making - so you’ve been dodging consequences yet again, and that’s just not. Not at all right. Ugh! Nothing is ever allowed to be simple, is it.

“Let’s go to bed early,” you suggest. “I’ll bring down some of whatever Roxy’s cooked up, there’ll be no need for a detour to the galley, you can get some good ol’ shuteye and I’ll head back out and take on whatever you still have left to do! Easy as pie.”

He protests, not quite as mightily as usual, which only adds to your conviction.

“We still gotta get the lines in, man, I promised, and if you lose one of those things setting up, that’s three more hours of our lives, c’mon, give me like ten minutes and I’ll be good to get back to work.”

“Nope. No, sir, I’m afraid I’ll do nothing of the sort,” you say. “I’ll figure it out my damn self, and you will be getting some rest!”

“Jake,” he complains, but too late. You’re on your feet, you’ve got him by one _sculpted_ arm and the seat of his pants, and even you can negotiate a fireman’s carry for a few moments, though it’s undoubtedly not the most comfortable configuration in which to be held.

Your knees protest, but your mouth and brain do not permit them to translate the ache to a complaint.

“Holy shit,” Dirk says quietly.

“Shush,” you say, veiling the strain in your voice as best you can. “Bedtime.”

No, you do not stagger like a baby deer, no matter how much Karkat’s laughter from the crow’s nest suggests that’s probably what the situation looks like. You carry your _goddamned_ boyfriend to the below-deck door, and you don’t even put him down to step inside, because Roxy is on her way out and opens it for you.

“That’s a funny lookin’ halibut!” she tells you as you thank her breathlessly.

“I-I’ll be up in a minute for some food for him,” you say, fighting to stay on your feet, gods be damned, has he recently eaten a bag of cement?

“I was just about to bring you kids some stew! It’s salt mutton again, but, well, I figure no one’s got any room to complain about their _macros_ when they’re what’s hanging upside-down off their bf’s shoulder instead of a nice big fish, huh? I’ll leave it on the stove if you’re not stayin’ out.”

“Thank you kindly,” you say again, trying to half-bow as you typically would and nearly plummeting head-over-heels down the steeply oriented stairs, a possibility you’ve been warned about rather extensively even absent an extra human weighing you down.

Roxy chuckles and lets you pass, and you actually do make it to the bed before your legs give out.

“Who the fuck told you my number one kink is being manhandled like a sack of potatoes?” Dirk asks, once you’ve managed to even out your breathing and stop shuddering with the effort.

You lean in, still trembling slightly, to kiss him on the forehead.

“That was you, dear heart. Repeatedly, while intoxicated, and occasionally offhand.”

“Oh. Right.”

He pouts a bit as you divest him of his boots, pants, and shirt, digging around in your shared drawers to find clean replacements before you let him under the covers. If there is anything about which you are positively militant, it is keeping Boat Goo out of the bed!

“Don’t go,” he says, half-muffled by the duvet, once you finish up and get him properly blanketed and pillowed and fussed-over.

“I must,” you say. “My beloved requires sustenance. Roxy made us bowls.”

“And then what?” he asks, with an outright tragic attempt at a seductive wink. It could also just be an oddly deliberate blink, since one of his eyes is not visible, pressed against the pillow as he’s settled in prone.

“And then,” you say, careful not to set your weight anywhere that you’ll get grime beneath the covers as you lean in to brush the hair from his face, your lips nearly to his ear, “you’ll get a well-deserved twenty winks, and I’ll voluntarily exile myself to the deck to figure out the fish thing.”

“The _fish thing_!” he says, sounding terribly beleaguered.

“Unless, that is,” you say, actually brushing your lips along the shell of his ear - he is really too easy to distract, “you’ll accept, instead, say, a sensual massage befitting the difficult work you do all day?”

He rolls over to look at you, almost certainly attempting to judge your sincerity and your state of mind. It’s somewhere between hilarious and unbearably heartwarming to watch Dirk wrestle with appreciation of your, shall we say, _fleshier_ talents and his bizarre prerogative not to take advantage of you, as though you aren’t _offering_ with both hands.

“Uh,” he says, which is, in this case, a complete sentence.

“Think it over,” you suggest, heading out to find the stew.

He’s dozing off once you return, which just about settles that. You leave him the bowl and utensils, knowing that he’ll be desperately hungry once he gets the chance to acknowledge it, and gracelessly finish your own on deck, alone beneath the stars.

You never loved the stars before - you used to see a different sky overhead in Aetria, and this one was jarringly foreign at first - but the god you stole has left you with indelible fingerprints on your very soul, and little gives you more of a sense of calm, now, than gazing up at their increasingly parseable and familiar patterns. Dirk and Vriska squabbled, much to your bemusement, on the first few nights, as they tried to name constellations overhead for your benefit. Apparently, different cultures in this part of the world have come up with different names.

To them, this manifested in an argument that very nearly came to drawn blades over whether or not a specific collection of stars was ‘Izanagi, you reprehensible bitch’, or else ‘Sagittarius, obviously, you’re the one with two eyes, fuckface, _look_ at it!”

For now, you mostly just think they’re quite pretty, and they remind you of her, the first entity that put it in your head that you might have the strength to do something more.

But it’s not Jade’s help you’re going to need to get this done.

You tear your gaze away from the vast expanse of constellations overhead and look out over the dark waves of the sea. This is where the fish live. You want a fish. How hard can it really be? Unfortunately, for now, the answer is ‘very, very hard, without help’, and you could really use someone in your corner.

Someone with tentacles!

“Excuse me,” you whisper out over the water. “Sea King? I beg your pardon, are you about, by any chance? Miss Sea King? Miss Rose Sea King? I humbly request your assistance!”

There’s not so much as a ripple to the waves that lap at the side of the ship. Perhaps she can’t hear you.

Pressing your fingers to your lips, you whistle a single low note, and add, in a slightly louder voice, “if you’re around, I would very much like to speak with you, ma’am!”

No response.

Oh well.

You turn away and pick up the line for yourself. The weighted end is very heavy, to help it sink. You watched Dirk skillfully loop all these lead chunks in to make it work, and that part, at least, is still something you couldn’t emulate if you tried, but perhaps you could figure out how to set the line, so it… what, trails behind the boat? Will you need to talk to Equius? Oh, you certainly hope not, he freaks you out a little bit!

With a sound like a thousand whispers, and a single wet noise like the ‘pop’ of lips pressed together in a kiss, a figure looms over the portside hull. From the torso up, she’s a remarkably lovely young woman, of dark complexion and fair hair, but her hips widen into possibly a thousand writhing black tentacles as she keeps pace alongside the ship. She wears a crown of spiky shark-teeth that match the ones in her mouth.

You stop, look up, and stand at attention, bowing to her for lack of anything else to do.

She clucks her tongue chidingly.

“Most people lack the presumption necessary to summon a King with a technique typically used to call in an unruly dog, Jake.”

“Well, yes, I… clearly I’m missing about five years of ritual training, but I thought I’d give this particular hail-mary a go!” you say eagerly, more or less shocked that your summons worked, but delighted to have her here, regardless of the unpleasantness of your last few interactions.

It’s always a treat to have the chance to win someone over!

“And here I am.”

“Yes! That’s awfully exciting, my goodness. Have you been well? Are the seas, ah, sea-ing along the way you prefer?”

“If you wouldn’t mind, I’m a reasonably busy deity. What is it that you ask of me?”

“Ah, sorry,” you say sheepishly. “Could you help me catch a fish?”

She pauses in her constant, pulsating tendril-sweeps and briefly falls behind the _Black Diamond II_ , her eyebrows raised high. After a split second, she easily matches the boat’s pace again, shaking her head as though to clear it.

“Perhaps I misheard you,” she says, “as unlikely as that is, given my relative omniscience.”

“I would like a fish, if you can spare one!”

“A fish.”

“A fish!”

“Did you attempt to catch one, as is typical practice?”

“Well, sort of! I helped, or rather hindered greatly, in the creation of all this gear we’ve got piled up, and, uh, I really don’t want to lose it to my own ineptitude, especially after making it was so difficult, and also, you’ve met Dirk, I assume you know his whole deal, and it would just be about the worst thing I can imagine to make him… think about all that stuff any more than he has to! I know how hard it is to make a new self out of an old one, I mean, so confounded _hard_ , and it’s not fair that he’s stuck living out patterns that hurt him when I could make it better on his behalf! He just - I mean, you know, he never really complains about anything, and finally I have the chance to _actually_ help, not just make a dick of myself with knots for hours that he could be resting.”

“Interesting. So you summoned a god.”

“Yes, that about sums it up?” you say, shrugging. “I don’t think I’ve got any more particularly persuasive rationale, but I figure if anyone can get me a fish, you can!”

She steeples her long fingers together and presses them to her chin as though she doesn’t quite know what to make of all this. To be honest, you don’t think one single fish is a particularly big ask. She’s got loads of them down there! But she sure seems to be treating it as one, so you swallow around your dry mouth and smile at her as winningly as you can manage.

“Do you know, Jake, why the process of summoning me typically demands years as an Acolyte of the Deep?”

“I’d assume that’s because it’s a real humdinger of a challenge to catch your attention?”

“Then you’d make an ass of you and me,” she says. “Because I simply have a preference for the sort of human willing to apply themselves to a challenge, to pursue their goals relentlessly, to _learn_ when given the opportunity.”

She reaches over with a massive tentacle and examines one of the lines.

“This is well-done.”

“Well, thank you, Miss Sea King!”

The appellation makes her wince.

“You may simply call me Rose, if that is the alternative.”

Agreeably, you nod your head.

“It will take some effort on your part, but I can show you how to set these lines.”

“Well, no problemo, Rose, I’ve got my second wind and I’m quite ready to put my back into following any good advice you’ve got for me!”

She smiles, almost bemusedly, and you catch a hint of pearly-white shark teeth behind her lips.

“If you have any mutton left in that stewbowl, use it to bait your hooks. Fish are not known for their discerning palates,” she advises.

As it happens, you do, and you busy yourself with tearing the bits that remain into adequately-sized shards and loading up two of your lines, each of which has four hooks of varying sizes. She intervenes once to remind you to use a sufficiently large piece on what Dirk earlier described as a halibut hook, and you happily comply.

“This is a sturdy ship. The railing built into the hull will serve as a mooring. You will need to tie another hitch to ensure that the line stays in place, but I imagine you’ve had enough practice with those by now. Leave yourself a sizable tail at the end; this will become necessary when you haul the line back up,” she directs you, now resting her forearms delicately on the hull, still swimming alongside the Black Diamond 2 rather than resting her weight on the port side, but with no apparent effort in doing so.

“Right-ho!” you agree.

“Soon you’ll lay anchor for the night, to drift and allow your helmsman a proper night’s sleep. Once you’re anchored in one place, you’ll want to drop your lines overboard, one on portside, one starboardside. When you wake up, ask for Roxy’s help if you’re truly doing this to spare Dirk the duty; she fished as well, before. Two bodies are needed for the task, one to anchor the line onboard, one to haul.”

She summons up luminescent golden apparitions to demonstrate the haulback protocol, and you nod, watching as studiously as you think you’ve ever executed an action in your life.

“That seems doable! I don’t know why I had such trouble with the practice on the old Black Diamond.”

“Yes, you do. You didn’t want to learn, then.”

“Ah, you may be right about that.”

“And yet, now you do,” she adds with an inscrutable smile. “Do not call me for such a trivial matter again, Jake.”

“Not to worry! I shan’t make a habit of it.”

“That said,” she continues, plunging two tentacles into the depths of the roiling black sea, pulling them up with no apparent strain after a few long seconds. “I will do you one better than ‘a fish’.”

“Good _heavens_!” you exclaim, as she offers you two large… well, fish. “What the devil are these?”

“Deepwater sablefish, or black cod in a sailor’s vernacular. A ridiculous misnomer, frankly; cod have three dorsal fins and two anal fins, definitionally, and physiologically, the differences couldn’t be more pronounced. The two are both roundfish, but the similarities end precisely there. Observe, for instance, that they are still alive.”

Obediently, you look down and observe. The two fish are massive, each about as long as your arm, probably six or seven kilograms apiece. They’re black from top to bottom, though more mottled on their fishy stomachs, and on the top bits they shine with a sort of green-blue duochrome where the light from the cabin hits them. They have beady little black eyes, and yes, they are very much alive, gasping and twisting angrily in the king’s grip.

Their struggle is more than a little hard to watch.

She seems to notice this, and leans forward with her normal-human hands, flicking each fish once to an area that approximates its forehead with an audible sound of bone splintering. The stop twisting in her tentacled grip.

“Sablefish are highly resistant to decompression, in contrast with most cod. They are capable of inhabiting environments of great depth and water pressure, and fairly shallow waters as well. Hardy fish, and quite beautiful in their natural habitat. I’m very fond of them myself. I know you were thinking of halibut, which have similar areas of physiological intrigue, but I took the liberty of choosing these instead on Dirk’s behalf. They’re a delicacy in his village of origin, particularly with the flesh served raw over rice. Roxy will know what to do with them.”

“Oh!” you say, which is about all you have in terms of a response to that.

“Here you are,” she tells you, offering the fish with extended tentacles. “They aren’t getting any fresher.”

“Thank you very much!” you say, gingerly reaching for the fish, thinking to grab them by the, ah, tails, you suppose?

“You poor thing, no. That’s how you drop a fish,” she chides. “Hook the opercule from the dorsal orientation, yes, from the top, get your thumb in one side, forefinger in the other. That’s a solid grip.”

They’re even heavier than they looked, but wow! Just like that, you’ve got two whole fish! Dirk is going to be so impressed. And, apparently, excited for the prospect of a delicacy, she said! Incredible.

“Truly, thank you!” you say again. “I’ve obviously got no right to ask you for a blasted thing, but -”

“Oh, obviously,” she agrees, with an even more sharklike smile. “But I like a human with gumption, and I love a challenge. I trust you’ve learned something tonight, hm?”

“You’re a lot like Dirk, you know,” you observe. “I’m awful surprised, to be honest, that it was John who took such an interest in him, y’know, of the lot of you, having met you as well!”

“Gods have different ways of expressing their affections,” she says, reaching up to pat your arm with a slick tentacle.

It takes a well-practiced second of intense composure and years of intimate familiarity with unpleasant touch not to shiver, to let the shock of it roll through you and not affect your smile.

She frowns, as though she can hear you, withdrawing the appendage.

“I’m sorry, dear Jake. You have a long way yet to go. Do take those to the galley, now, and wake Dirk.”

You hoist the sablefish with some effort, your grin returned to full wattage, and lift one to your forehead in a sort of salute.

“Yes, ma’am! ‘Sea’ you around, Rose!”

“I will sink this ship if I ever hear you make that pun again,” she says, though she’s smiling as she says it, so you figure that was a successfully-executed wordplay if you’ve ever done one.

Then, she disappears back into the depths of the sea with a noise like a suction cup pulled loose from its mooring.

“What the fuck is going on down there?” Karkat calls from the crow’s nest.

You hold up the fish illustratively.

“The Sea King gave me these! How soon are we putting down anchor, mate?”

“Another hour, I - what?”

“Thanks!”

Before he can ask too many more questions, you retreat into the galley. These are awfully heavy fish to just be carting around, trying to explain yourself!

Roxy about loses her mind when you stick the two sablefish in the galley sink.

“How the hell did you get these?” she half-laughs, half-demands. “I’ve never seen a nicer couple of black cod! Shit, in the Velvet Court, you’d get two hundred crowns a pop for these babies, and even that’s not _fresh outta the sea_!”

“They’re from the Sea King,” you explain patiently, much easier now that you’re not actively lugging the carcasses around. “She says Dirk will like them.”

“Uh, _anyone_ would like them, but - shit! Okay, well, guess you’re on fish duty now, dude,” she laughs, hefting one of the fish and expertly running a knife around the head, neatly pulling it from the carcass, removing the guts and handing them to you. “Go toss these, will you? Don’t need ‘em stinkin’ up the galley.”

“Rodger dodger!” you say, and proceed to assist-slash-observe as she neatly transforms the fish from, well, fish, to a series of neatly sliced pieces of white flesh, arranged artfully in a bowl.

“I’ll save these in the icebox, fresh sashimi for everyone tomorrow!” she declares, scrounging around for a small dish for some traditional dressing for Dirk. “Hey, all done, pretty much. Careful, though. Wake him up with this, he may just propose on the spot.”

She offers you the dishes and a saucy wink. You make a noble effort not to blush.

Dirk hasn’t touched the stew you left for him, and it’s since gone cold - not a problem! He’s snoring softly when you shoulder your way into his cabin and set the dishes down to change your filthy clothes. You’ll set the lines later, but for now, you’re chilly and a little damp from washing the fish guts from yourself, and you’re looking forward to some high-quality, grade-A cuddle time.

“Wake up, dearest,” you say, settling in beside him. “Dinner. You must be starving.”

“Nnnph?” he says, regaining consciousness inelegantly and reaching for you before he really has a sense of where he is, nearly upending the dish in your lap.

“Sh,” you say, setting the food beside the mostly-congealed stew, ick. “Not proper morning yet, but I hope you had a good nap, beloved.”

Snuggling back up beneath the comforter, you recall that you’re rather exhausted yourself, and forcibly restrain the desire to just pull him close against your chest and fall asleep. Wonderful as that does sound.

“God, you’re right, I could eat… shit, I’d even eat salt mutton,” he sighs, propping himself up. “Your toes are fucking freezing.”

“Well, I got you something! With the help of Roxy, and honestly it was mostly the Sea King’s doing, but I’m pretty sure we’re friends at this point,” you explain, offering him the bowl now that he seems a little more conscious.

“Wait. Shit. So many questions. Is this …?” He pops a piece of fish into his mouth with two fingers and grins. “Holy fuck, Jake, this isn’t gindara, is it?”

“I don’t really know what you just said, but I’m pretty sure the answer is ‘yes’! The Sea King said it was kind of a special food for you, given where you’re from and all, and she seemed to think you’d like it.”

“Like it? Holy _fuck_.” He looks like he might be fighting back tears. “You summoned the Sea King… so that you could make me sashimi?”

“I don’t know why everyone seems so surprised! It’s a very in-character move for me, I think we can all agree! Also, Roxy wouldn’t let me touch the fish, she said I’d mess it up.”

“I’ll talk to her,” he says, picking up another piece, dipping it briefly in the sauce, and eating it with the sort of moan you’re far more accustomed to hearing during very different bedroom-type activities.

“No, she was right! I just want to credit the meal properly is all.”

“Regardless,” he says, waving his hand. “Thank you. So much. I mean, wow.”

“Oh, and the Sea King taught me how to fish! Roxy’s going to help me with haulback tomorrow morning. You’re not allowed to help. It’s not your job,” you say, with great conviction, because it isn’t, really. _Both of you_ have quit your old jobs, and if he’s going to make such an effort to help you be… what you want to be, independent of anyone else, you’ll do the same for him until you’re back with the damned Dead King for good!

Finished, he tosses the bowl aside and pulls you into a hug.

“Wow,” he murmurs into the collar of your shirt. “I don’t even fuckin’ know what to say. Fuck.”

“Don’t say anything, then,” you tell him, running your hands in gentle circles at his shoulder blades, feeling his back rise and fall with each breath, as he leans his weight against you. “I’ve got you.”

“That’s horrifying,” he laughs. “But fuck, I guess you do.”

Maybe not in all the same ways he’s been there to catch you in the last few months, maybe not with the same devotion he’s offered you so selflessly over and over again. You’re not sure anyone can love quite the way Dirk can. There’s something special about his heart, an inimitable depth to his affections, a certainty to it that confuses you just as much as it… well, it delights you, makes you want more, makes you want to deserve it, somehow, as though there’s anyone in the world worthy of the way he looks at you.

“Hey, uh,” you say, as you feel him begin to go slack against you, drifting back to sleep. “I, uh, I kind of wrote a song, if you want to hear it. I didn’t want to just, you know, bug everyone with it on deck, but you’re always… with the singing, and I… well, if you liked it, maybe we could get it going together, and it wouldn’t sound so silly with just one person!”

This wakes him right up, for which you almost feel guilty, but when else do you ever get him alone?

“I’m all ears, morning star.”

Aaaand you’re blushing furiously again, digging around in the bedside table for the inconspicuous little notebook where you’ve been writing intermittently, as inspiration comes to you, which is to say, not often and not much, but enough!

You still don’t know how the hell Dirk can come up with rhymes on the spot. You have a whole list of words for brainstorming rhymes that takes up more page space than the actual song, and just the sight of it makes you feel awfully nervous. Especially without your guitar, since it’s just your dumb voice - nope!

No more fretting! You’re singing now.

[[Tune: Morning Glory]](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jUq4D9kH7wY)

_Once the work gets done and I’m tucked ‘neath deck and I’ve got to pass the time_  
_I pick up a pen and I write a little verse in the hope something just might rhyme_  
_See, I fell in love with you and the ocean too singing into the hours late_  
_But it’d be bloody rude to beseech you for song and to not reciprocate!_

"…ah, chime in with the chorus as you catch on?" you interject, pausing, and Dirk nods, bemused but enthusiastic.

_One for the ol’ Black Diamond,_  
_Two times we beat the odds_  
_Three for the months yet spent a-sail_  
_And four for the pirate gods, my love!_  
_Four for the pirate gods!_

_Well, it’s been a few months since I’ve joined the crew and I can’t claim I’ve nailed it yet_  
_It’s proper hard work and there’s only so many bruises a gent can get!_  
_And while I’m rather stoked for the pillaging bit, our hold’s already stacked_  
_So I’m doing as you say and trying to get by, filling in where there’s a lack_  
_And singing!_

_One for the ol’ Black Diamond,_  
_Two times we beat the odds_  
_Three for the months yet spent a-sail_  
_And four for the pirate gods, my love!_  
_Four for the pirate gods!_

_We’re headed once more to the Velvet Court to dispense our cargo hold_  
_And I really can’t say for how long we’ll stay or how much it’ll make us, sold_  
_But as something more than your prisoner I’m stoked for a plumb new path_  
_And if Tavros doesn’t remember us, he may even let us in the baths!_  
_Singing!_

_One for the ol’ Black Diamond,_  
_Two times we beat the odds_  
_Three for the months yet spent a-sail_  
_And four for the pirate gods, my love!_  
_Four for the pirate gods!_

_There’s a whole lot on the horizon and I don’t just mean the land_  
_The last few months have turned out a way that I never could’ve planned!_  
_Wherever you should roam, my love, I hope I can come along_  
_If not for my deckhand talents, p’rhaps I’ll sway you with my songs!_  
_Singing!_

_One for the ol’ Black Diamond,_  
_Two times we beat the odds_  
_Three for the months yet spent a-sail_  
_And four for the pirate gods, my love!_  
_Four for the pirate gods!_

“I’m thinking about adding a verse about the Sea King, or maybe a whole new song!” you add, when he doesn’t immediately say anything in response. “I bet she appreciates a good ode-ish sort of ditty. I can see why you like her so much, with the tattoo and all, a really wonderful, uh, deity all around!”

“Gods, you’re fucking brilliant, and I’ll kill anyone who says otherwise. They’ll die screaming,” Dirk says, gazing up at you reverently.

“You stop that,” you say, chuckling as your face heats up and reaching to cover his eyes so you don’t have to see him looking at you 

He bites your hand, and you yelp and withdraw it, frowning at him, now.

“That took me nearabouts a week,” you admit. “I had so much trouble with the, you know, with the syllables?”

“It’s all practice,” he says. “‘Specially if you’re starting with _talent_ , fuck.”

“S’pose there’s no accounting for taste,” you laugh, nestling into the pillows and pulling him up to your chest again. He’s much warmer than the ambient temperature, and it’s altogether too pleasant when he snuggles closer, pressing his body against yours, resting his weight on you.

It’s a tempting idea, that you might be able to care for such a fearsome man, as gentle and kittenlike as he does get when he’s half-asleep. You can’t imagine him willingly _asking_ someone to tend to him, even in the sense of dealing with a task that makes him unhappy - what a privilege to be in a position to do so! But with your bones heavy with exhaustion as they are, leaving the bed is about the last thing that you want to do, damn the lines and damn the fish and damn the Sea King.

For a second, you indulge yourself in the idea, brush the bleached hair from his face, press a kiss to his forehead, then another when he mumbles something pleased-sounding at the contact.

Somewhere outside, the sea anchor hits the surf and you can _feel_ the ship’s forward motion arrested. Damn.

Bracing yourself for the unpleasantness of it all - because it’s what he’s done for you so damned many times, because you _can’t_ let him or his gods down, because you _promised_ \- you carefully extricate yourself from his arms, shushing him softly as he protests.

You change back into your deck clothes, cursing your own hypercompetence, commitment to excellence, and altruism in general, and close the door behind you.

“Want some extra hands out there?” Roxy asks, as you hoist yourself back up to your fate, your palms already feeling raw and swollen and clumsy from all the damned work you’ve already done today.

“I’m just dropping the lines in,” you tell her, willing yourself not to turn the simple statement into a solicitous whine.

Which would be very easy to do, since most of your internal monologue is currently taking place in exactly such a tone.

“Ooh, lemme know how it goes!” she says.

“Actually, if I could take a rain check on your offer of assistance now and cash in tomorrow morning, I’ll doubtless need some help with haulback, based on what the Sea King told me,” you add, twisting one of your rings a bit nervously, not really sure how to ask without applying either way too much ‘charisma’ or about as much as one of the dead fish in the icebox.

It’s a remarkably delicate balance to strike!

Roxy seems a fairly safe place to start - you know that she and Dirk are particularly close, even among the crew, and she’s made an awful lot of friendly overtures in the past, though you haven’t exactly handled those sorts of forays especially well, er, _ever_ , so. Either way. You add the most helpless smile you can summon up to sweeten the deal.

“You don’t gotta look at me like a kicked dog, dude! I’m always down to clown with the fishin’ stuff. Honestly, I’d’a made the lines, too, but Dirk can get so territorial when he’s got a project. Once he decides something’s his job… yikes. I love the dude, but I think he’d sooner tear himself to itty bitty pieces of beefcake than admit he could use some help! Fuckin’ good on you, honestly. Just hit me up if there’s anything I can do to make it easier for ya!”

“Ha, well, someone’s got to do it!” you say, feeling about three inches taller with the mild praise alone.

“Shouldn’t take you too long if you’re just setting two,” she adds.

“See you soon, then!” you reply, saluting smartly and hurrying out on deck, thinking of nothing so much as the quickest way to get yourself back to the cozy warmth of Dirk’s cabin.

It’s not a terrible task, all things considered. You recall that Dirk said the depth was around three hundred fathoms; you tie off the lines at the ‘three hundred’ mark, leaving sizeable tails of line left to be used to haul back the catch come morning. Then, once both lines are affixed, one to the guard rail on each side of the ship, you heft the end with the baited hooks and the leaden weights and hoist it into the roiling black waters of the sea.

The hitch holds as the line goes taut, and you could honestly cheer with excitement. You barely restrain yourself from doing so, since you’ve given Karkat quite enough reason to laugh at you tonight. The other one goes just as well! You are a goddamned master of tying one specific knot! Butterfingers whomst?

You watch the weighted line disappear over the portside hull, and you wonder if there’s anything specific that you’re supposed to say to thank the Sea King. Maybe Roxy knows? For now, you settle on murmuring ‘thank you, Rose!’ and staring into the depths for a little longer than necessary before heading back in, even though you’d sprint if you had the energy.

She doesn’t reply or anything, but like she said, she’s a busy deity.

“Didn’t hear any anguished screaming, so I figure it went well?” Roxy says, looking up from something that looks suspiciously un-food-like that she’s stirring up in a glass vessel.

“Yeah, ah, as well as I could’ve hoped!” you say, after a probably-excessive second of staring at the black sludge she’s mixing.

“If you want to hang around and learn a bit about nitrifying toluene, you’re super welcome,” she says, catching on to your focus and smiling,

“Pr’haps another time,” you say.

“Cool, sleep well! See you in the morning, bright ‘n early!” she says cheerfully, pulling a mask over her mouth and nose and returning to her work as you exhale and shuffle off to the cabin, limping again now that you remember how badly your knee hurts, though injuring it feels like it happened a lifetime ago.

How did you ever feel bored with life on a ship? It’s beyond fathoming, now, when time seems to stretch like saltwater taffy, turning hours into minutes but days into full weeks. You manage to feel like a whole different person each time you return to the cabin to sleep, and not just because you’re unrecognizable with fresh grime and bruises.

For the last time tonight, you strip down to your skivvies and have a go at dutifully cleaning your face and your piercings before you slip into bed. It’d be damn well disastrous to have something health-wise happen out here, even with all the antibiotics the crew liberated from Aetria on the way out.

Just thinking the name in such a context is wildly unpleasant, gets you in a bad spot, the sort it would be easy to linger in, so you do your best to put a stop to that by slipping into bed and cozying up with Dirk, who is well and truly asleep, so much so that he doesn’t even stir at your presence.

You like him like this, and not just because there’s no way to let him down when he’s unconscious, no expectations of which you can fall short. That’s certainly a part of it, and not a small part, but the cut of his jaw is just so terribly handsome when he relaxes slightly, which he rarely does in his waking state, all bundled-tight nerves, electric as a live wire. His chest rises and falls with comforting regularity, the swell of his musculature as familiar and reassuring a home as you’ve ever had the privilege to know.

Life may be hard, but your boyfriend’s pecs are soft, and you settle in behind him, one hand copping the gentlemanliest of feels, the other supporting his head as you spoon.

While you’re already well and truly drifting off to dreamland, you grip him tighter to your chest as you recall what he said earlier - you’ve got him. 

Yes, you suppose you do.


	2. Hand Over Hand (or, for the halibut, redux)

“Is this one a halibut?” you ask, holding up a bizarrely-shaped fish, with a long, frilly tail connected to a huge and bulbous body bearing two massive amber eyes, both of which have popped out of their sockets in the process of hoisting the line up from the depths.

“Mmmnope! That’s a giant grenadier. Not great eating, but she’ll make a tasty stew!” Roxy explains.

“Hm,” you say, squinting at the big floppy fellow as it sheds what remains of its scales on the deck, twitching weakly.

With a single sharp blow of the gaffhook Roxy gave you, you spear it through the eye and put an end to the poor thing’s suffering. Roxy pats your shoulder approvingly as you toss the grenadier further on deck, then pull up the next fish.

This one is vividly red, with a mouth that seems to take up most of its body and an array of spines lining its head and back and augmenting its spoon-shaped fins. Its eyes, also, are popped out crudely, and you’re reminded of the sablefish the Sea King gave you and her comment about their smaller eyes and hardier constitution.

“This one’s a thornyhead, but we call ‘em ‘idiotfish’, since they’re awful silly lookin’ and sometimes you catch two on one hook - they’re that dumb,” Roxy explains, preempting your question.

You sigh. Yet another fish that isn’t a halibut!

“Is it good to eat?”

“I can cook anything we catch out here. These li’l guys are pretty tasty fresh, but they don’t freeze too well.”

“Huh! Alright, well, I guess that’s good,” you say, spearing this one through the eye as well, with only the slightest wince, and tossing it back to her as you drag up the next fish from the line.

It’s a pretty sizable sorta gooey pancake-looking fish, brown with two eyes on one side, speckly grey with no eyes on the other, bearing an enormous diamond-shaped mouth packed with jagged teeth that it opens and shuts like it means to take a chunk out of your foot. You shift back so as not to give it the opportunity.

“He’s a tricky one,” Roxy says. “Can you see the second eye from the blind side?”

“Sorta,” you say, squinting and leaning in despite the needle-toothed peril of it all.

“Then that’s an arrowtooth flounder,” she explains. “Again, kinda meh eating, but protein is protein and eating is eating!”

“Sure is,” you agree, but with every fish that conspicuously isn’t a halibut, your heart falls a little bit. You had been really hoping to catch a halibut!

One more grenadier, this one even bigger than the last, and you move over portside to finish the job with the second line. It’s not that early - half past seven by one of the stolen clocks that Karkat’s set up in the galley to keep everyone on schedule - but the sun seems recalcitrant about fully rising or showing through the clouds, and it’s all cold and damp and blue-grey.

As before, you make sure Roxy’s got a strong grip on the line, unravel the icicle hitch, tossing the full weight back to her to anchor as you begin to hoist the rope up, hand over hand. This takes a proper long time, and Roxy helps keep a rhythm between you - pull, hold, pull, hold - with a shanty that you’re eighty percent certain she’s pulling out of her ass, but that she insists is an ancient and heavily translated fisherwomen’s work song.

You’re starting to realize that it isn’t just Dirk - everyone on this ship is freakishly good at ad-libbing songs. This one is call and response, and it’s easy to fall into Roxy’s stride as she hauls behind you.

[[Tune: Paddy Lay Back]](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ei9byYF5cCY)

_It’s a cold and windy morning on the ocean_  
_(the ocean)_  
_And we’ve got a line to haul between us two_  
_(between us two)_  
_But once we get this up and bring the fish in_  
_(the fish in)_  
_There’ll be breakfast to be had for me ‘n you_  
_(me ‘n you)_

_Brace as you stand!_  
_(brace as you stand!)_  
_Hand over hand!_  
_(hand over hand!)_  
_Pass the line on to me as you bring her through!_  
_(bring her through!)_  
_Just a few hundred fathoms till the work’s done!_  
_(the work’s done!)_  
_And we’ll rest and have some fish to feed the crew!_

_Well the groundswell’s got us rockin’ like a skin horse_  
_(a skin horse?)_  
_But we haven’t lost a fish off hook of yet_  
_(not of yet)_  
_We’ve got to get this line up ‘fore we set course_  
_(set course)_  
_Let’s see just how efficient we can get!_  
_(we can get)_

_race as you stand!_  
_(brace as you stand!)_  
_Hand over hand!_  
_(hand over hand!)_  
_Pass the line on to me as you bring her through!_  
_(bring her through!)_  
_Just a few hundred fathoms till the work’s done!_  
_(the work’s done!)_  
_And we’ll rest and have some fish to feed the crew!_

_It’s not as easy as just summoning the Sea King_  
_(the Sea King)_  
_Though tbh I guess that’s pretty tough?_  
_(tough indeed!)_  
_But you’ll cut those biceps fast with lots of hauling_  
_(hauling)_  
_As a fisherman we’ll get ya up to snuff!_  
_(up to snuff!)_

_Brace as you stand!_  
_(brace as you stand!)_  
_Hand over hand!_  
_(hand over hand!)_  
_Pass the line on to me as you bring her through!_  
_(bring her through!)_  
_Just a few hundred fathoms till the work’s done!_  
_(the work’s done!)_  
_And we’ll rest and have some fish to feed the crew!_

This continues for many, many more verses. Roxy, upon presumably running out of fishing events to riff on, begins to alternate through praising grand feats and shamelessly spreading gossip about the crew. Equius is noted in equal parts for once having punched through the hull of a ship barehanded and for not having realized that an uncommonly quiet lady was actually a statue until midway through a somewhat unspeakable sex act.

It’s heavier work than the previous line, which you hope is a good sign, but might also mean that you’re getting exhausted from the repetitive motion.

She finally lands on Dirk for the shanty treatment, and he gets, appropriately, an entire verse dedicated to his blowjob prowess that seduced the Wind King.

“You want to fill in a few?” she adds breathlessly, pausing mid-song. “I think I’ve missed a lot of Di Stri’s more recent feats of daring.”

Oh heavens to _fuck_ , you are so bad at rhyming on the spot.

But screw it! You nod, set your jaw to pull the rope in yet again, passing one of your markers, and begin to sing.

_Dirk proved a hero when we journeyed to Death’s Isle_  
_(Death’s Isle),_ Roxy obligingly echoes  
_He saved our quest with strength and thinking fast_  
_(thinking fast)_  
_Where I messed up, he filled in with a smile_  
_(a smile)_  
_And talked us home and free of Death’s cold grasp_  
_(imagine that!)_

_Brace as you stand!_  
_(brace as you stand!)_  
_Hand over hand!_  
_(hand over hand!)_  
_Pass the line on to me as you bring her through!_  
_(bring her through!)_  
_Just a few hundred fathoms till the work’s done!_  
_(the work’s done!)_  
_And we’ll rest and have some fish to feed the crew!_

_In Aetria he made another bold stand_  
_(a bold stand)_  
_Protected crew below and Gods above!_  
_(Gods above!)_  
_At grievous cost of heartache and his left hand_  
_(his left hand)_  
_He bested prince and country with his love!_  
_(you boys are cute!)_

_Brace as you stand!_  
_(brace as you stand!)_  
_Hand over hand!_  
_(hand over hand!)_  
_Pass the line on to me as you bring her through!_  
_(bring her through!)_  
_Just a few hundred fathoms till the work’s done!_  
_(the work’s done!)_  
_And we’ll rest and have some fish to feed the crew!_

“Aw!” Roxy declares, once you finish the chorus. “You fuckin’ nailed it! Knocked those verses right outta the park! I’ve never been more inspired by tales of Dirk’s weirdass romantic shenanigans, including the blowjob stories, and those are choice as hell.”

“How about you?” you laugh. “Is it poor etiquette to craft a verse about oneself?”

“In this sort of song? Li’l bit!”

“Brace yourself, then, I’ll do my best,” you say grimly, and launch back into singing when the pull-hold rhythm lapses into the correct place.

 _And Roxy’s also one hell of a pirate_  
_(a pirate!)_  
_Her beauty and her strength beyond compare_  
_(fff thank you Jake!)_  
_Whether black powder or halibut, she’ll cook it_  
_(she sure will!)_  
_And she’s the best fish-catching teacher anywhere!_  
_(i’m gonna cry)_

 _Brace as you stand!_  
_(brace as you stand!)_  
_Hand over hand!_  
_(hand over hand!)_  
_Pass the line on to me as you bring her through!_  
_(bring her through!)_  
_Just a few hundred fathoms till the work’s done!_  
_(the work’s done!)_  
_And we’ll rest and have some fish to feed the crew!_

The first cluster of weights breaches the water’s surface, and you watch breathlessly as you slowly hoist up… another spiny red fish, damn. A pretty massive one, though, which gives you some real trouble as you gaff it over to Roxy. That’s not too bad, right? Except for the ache building in your wrists with the exertion, which is certainly not _great_.

Another grenadier follows after a few more pulls, and you frown as you gaff the silly-looking thing and toss it her way. Then another damned grenadier! It’s enough to make you wonder if these weird gelatinous monster-fish are the only blasted fellows lurking down on the ocean floor. What a sight that must be.

Then, with a mighty tug - more on Roxy’s part than yours, since you’re plumb tuckered out and have mostly given up - an enormous brown flatfish with a pearlescent white belly slowly winches up towards the deck.

“Holy shit!” Roxy declares, scootching up behind you to get a better look. “Dude, pull her up, before she bends the hook!”

Obligingly, you give the line all you’ve got left, which isn’t a lot. Even with the proportionately small head nearly up to the guardrail, the fish’s mighty tail still trails in the waves.

The damned thing must be about as long as you are tall!

What an incredible victory that would be, if you had an ounce of strength left in your trembling arms. Gritting your teeth, you aim for the small eye, but instead more or less gaff the big fellow through the… neck? And not a moment too soon, because the fish is thrashing straight off the hook, all its weight suddenly on your gaff hand, and Roxy has to hurl herself forward to keep you in the boat, the line wrapped around one strong arm, the other bolstering you by the chest, just barely holding you in place as you wrestle with the fish.

If only you were just a little stronger! You’ve arrived at an impasse with the sea monster, but you will not let this beautiful fish go, no sir, not for all the gold in the cargo hold and back in Aetria besides!

“Hey!” Roxy shouts. “Little help portside?”

Your grip on the gaffhook is wavering when a second hook spears the fish straight through the eye, putting a stop to its struggle and finally allowing you the leverage to drag the thing on board, though you tumble down to the deck with it in the process, and find yourself looking up at a decidedly terrifying face.

“C’mon, get your shit together,” Vriska says, extracting her hook-hand from the fish’s eye with a fleshy ‘pop’ and a gout of gelatinous and vividly red blood. “Fish go _in_ the boat, dumbass.”

Winded as you are, your back plastered to the deck, your arms noodle-like with over-exertion, the gaffhook still clenched in your fist, all you can really do is nod in agreement.

Roxy recovers well before you do and begins to fuss over the fish immediately.

“It’s gotta be near two meters! Get Karkat and his little measuring tape out here, we gotta document this, I’m not gettin’ called out for a big fish story by my own fuckin’ crew.”

“Which… sort of fish… did we get?” you ask weakly, as Vriska cleans her hook and looks on in mild amusement.

“ _This_ is a halibut, dude!” she says excitedly.

That wakes you right the heck up, you’ll say!

“Oh gracious! This handsome fellow?” you say, rolling over in the seawater, blood, and fish goo to get a better look at your catch. “What a fine specimen he is!”

“I’ve seen bigger,” Vriska says.

You glance over at her nervously, then back at Roxy, who chuckles when she realizes the origin of your panicked glance.

“Did you hear our boy Jakey summoned another King last night?” she cuts in, nudging you affectionately with the toe of her boot. “That’s how come we got the fish for the sashimi I made this morning.”

“No shit?” she replies, letting her hook drop to her side. “Well, fuck, nice going, English. Really earning your keep.”

And you are, aren’t you?

She heads below deck to find Karkat, presumably, and you eventually get ahold of yourself enough to sit up properly and realize just how disgusting you are. Bluh. These clothes would be a lost cause if you didn’t still have probably another month of gross work to get through.

“Got a li’l somethin’-somethin’ there,” Roxy says, snorting and leaning in to wipe a fairly substantial gob of fish blood from your face. “Aw, don’t pout! You did great! This is gonna be a damn tasty couple of meals. This haul’s gonna feed us all for a week.”

You’re still pretty much paralyzed by the feel of your slimy clothes _clinging_ to your skin. How terrible must you smell, let alone look? You need to jump into the ocean immediately, whether or not it’s frightfully cold. Better to die of hypothermia than to live as a grotesque parody of yourself!

“Before you melt into a puddle, there, wanna help me clean ‘em?” she prods.

You nod wordlessly, still not ready to talk.

“Okay, tight! Time to learn your cuts. Some of ‘em are obvious, some are a little more complicated!”

She shows you how to flay the living daylights out of a grenadier, until it’s mostly just a pile of mottled pink-white fleshy bits, the guts scraped out and the carcass stripped of scales and inedible bits and ready for the stewpot. While you watch the first two, you’re feeling decent enough to give the last one a shot yourself, and the thing is, you can’t really mess up - either way, the meat gets eaten and everyone’s stomachs are full, which is what matters!

It does help that she reminds you of this fact cheerfully throughout the process. Even though yours doesn’t look quite like hers, it’s not terrible for a first attempt! At least, that’s what she says, and you’re pretty sure you’re ready to trust her at this point.

The halibut, once appropriate measurements have been taken, gets its guts cut out and its head cut off, as you watch curiously. She calls what she does to the red fish an ‘eastern cut’, which means that the head is separated from the body below the girdle of the pectoral fins.

“Wanna see something cool?” she adds, waving the larger red fish head in your general direction.

“Uh, sure!”

“Sick, check this out!”

She makes a quick cut behind the eye of the spiny red skull, deep enough that you can hear the bone crack, then snaps it open like she’s opening a coin purse.

Two jagged… bones?... stick up from the skull, from either side of the elongated brain tissue, different colored than the rest of it. Kind of shiny and pearly white in contrast with the muted ivory of the rest of the structural parts.

“Pretty neat, huh?” she says, teasing them out with her knifetip, each about the size of an olive, but flat, like a press-on nail.

“What are they?” you ask, leaning in.

“Otoliths! Like, the fish’s ear bones. Fefs can tell how long it’s been alive by the rings and layers on the inside, like how a tree gets all ring-y when it gets older. But I dunno, I just think they’re neat.”

“They are _indeed_ neat!” you agree, entranced. “And they all have these little thingies up in their skulls?”

Fish have skulls! Oh, right there, that’s an idea to explore.

“Yeah, even black cod, though they have really tiny ones, like grains of rice, it’s wild. I saved the heads of yours for stew and tips, if you want to see ‘em?”

The whole macabre business of it doesn’t seem nearly so bad when you remember that fish goo isn’t too unlike human corpse goo, and you don’t mind human corpse goo at all! Sure, it smells a little saltier and the blood is a little stickier and less watery, but it’s not too different, tactilely, and once the scales are off, you can’t really tell the difference. Meat is meat. You start to wonder what you could do with these bones, how different they probably look than the terrestrial creatures you started out with.

“That lit ya right up!” Roxy observes. “Let’s go check ‘em out! You’re welcome to dick around with the leftover bits all you want.”

You actually don’t end up seeing Dirk all morning, which is a little disappointing, since you’re really looking forward to his reaction to the halibut, but overall doesn’t weigh down your mood all that much once you find a new Bone Interest. There’s so much potential in the otoliths! It’d be so easy to scrub them down like a skull, gild them, seal them, and turn them into positively _awesome_ jewelry, with a story attached and all. A fish’s whole life hanging from your ear!

Someone could paint a picture of the fish, even, since some of them are really lovely or silly-looking. Gosh, if you were a little better with the whole art business... there’s a skill you could stand to work on, and you could make a whole thing of it.

All caught up in the ideas, you’re almost surprised when Roxy comes up with some warm water for a deck-shower before you get ushered down to the hold with Nepeta and Feferi to help with the ever-pressing work of stolen Aetrian trinket identification, which usually makes you kind of sad and moody, but nothing can dampen your enthusiasm today!

After all, you are quite damp already, and showing no sign of distress as a result.

You also have the great idea to ask Feferi about the articulation of fish skeletons, and get a whole delightful earful for your troubles, which spurs a lot of brand new ideas about bones and fancy sculptures and whatnot, once you can convince them to let you beat a few trinkets into gold leaf and scare up some proper glaze.

Lunch, delivered by Aradia as she taps Feferi out to some deck work and takes her spot for the evaluation and documentation team, is seared halibut over rice, pickled zucchini, and what you think are thin-sliced pickled plums. It’s possibly the most delicious thing you’ve ever eaten. And people keep telling you ‘great work’, as though you cooked it yourself!

Perhaps you should learn to cook? The praise is making you feel a little hot under the collar, but you really, _really_ like it.

Answering questions about Aetrian culture does get a little gloomy after a while, though. Another pretty gold object set aside for your assessment turns out to be someone’s ornamental collar-buckle, and that segues into a half-hour explanation of different castes’ views on the appropriateness of different forms of - well, not exactly enslavement, but, erm, you know! Sort of a little bit of enslavement, but the cushy kind that no one really minds too much!

It seems to horrify Nepeta and Aradia, who apparently were formerly galley-slaves themselves, and inevitably ends with you awkwardly explaining that no one treats you all that poorly, it’s a guaranteed meal, after all, and some of your best friends, if you can call them that, are… are… y’know, and they don’t mind it any more than you minded your work. In fact, you were housed together during your training and it was… er, the literal translation of ‘caro supellecta’ is the somewhat unflattering appellation ‘flesh furniture’, but they taught you all you know!

Luckily, that quiets everyone down real quick, and you’re back to pointing out prominent artists’ signatures that might be referenced to eke out more value from a gilded mahogany lampstand and explaining the mythological significance of the two snakes devouring each other that decorate the fine-woven silken funerary shrouds that someone (Aradia, Roxy, or perhaps both?) mysteriously decided to pilfer.

And you’re good at that. You know your own culture, at least. You know it better than you know anything, and you try not to be too stubborn about defending the way things were, but they just don’t get it! How could they, never having lived it?

You offer to bring everyone’s dishes up once the obvious work for you to do runs dry - there’ll be plenty more questions to answer tomorrow, once they’ve worked their way through more of the packed cargo hold - and immediately end up commissioned by a clipboard-bearing Karkat to clean the fish blood from the deck before it sets, and, well, roger that, you suppose.

A day at sea’s not a day at sea without an hour or two spent on your knees, scrubbing the hell out of some wood, in the least sexy way possible!

“What’s got you tied up out here?” someone interrupts, just as you approach an acceptable level of done-ness.

“The tragic consequences of protein acquisition duty, which turn out to include a remarkably unpleasant level of... deck-scrubbing duty,” you complain, then look up to see Dirk smiling fondly down at you, holding two cups of tea.

He looks better-rested than he has in days, and while your teeth are practically chattering with the amount of time you’ve spent on deck - it’s chilly, with the approach of autumn! - you beam right back at him.

“I do hope one of those is for me,” you sigh, feeling a bit petulant about all you’ve done today.

“Nope, I’m knockin’ both back while you watch, that’s the plan,” he says, seating himself beside you on the deck. “C’mon, dude, it’s going to be shitty compared to your tea, but I tried, okay? Obviously one is yours. Give it to me straight. How bad’s the damage?”

You set aside the well-worn scrub brush, noting the blood and soap and scum coagulated under your fingernails with a grimace, and accept the gilded porcelain teacup, taking in its familiar style with a pang of nostalgia.

As is appropriate, you let the steam waft for a moment and gauge the scent before you try to taste; black tea, a red fruit note, some kind of heavy floral scent, not exactly _inspired_ , but not a novice effort, either.

His smile widens as you lean in to take a sip.

Hibiscus, that’s the flower. Pomegranate. Rose - ha! And simple black tea, over-boiled slightly, which is difficult to do with black tea unless one has added the herbal elements a bit too late and likely reheated the brew to allow them full opportunity to steep.

But what a clever concept, for a beginner. Litgamella possess an entire lexicon that can be translated in tea alone, messages too subtle for any but those in the _know_ to discern, difficult to brew and near-impossible to fully comprehend, but delightful teases for potential clients to attempt to unravel.

“What are your intentions, my dear?” you ask playfully, taking another sip. “Black _and_ red.”

“Oh shit, is there some secret, like, meaning? Oh fuck. Of course there is. What did I say?”

His beautiful dark eyes are wide as saucers. After so long busy with different tasks - hours, psh, it’s been weeks since you’ve seen him, at least! - you drink in the sight of him far more eagerly than the tea, though the warmth of the beverage is extremely welcome.

“Jaaaaake,” he insists, drawing out your name across several syllables. “C’mon, tell me what I said.”

“That’s hardly appropriate above-deck conversation,” you tell him, with a saucy wink that makes him frown. “Do give me a moment to finish with my drudgery, and I’ll have to show you.”

You take another sip, letting a few drops moisten your lips, chapped though they are by wind and salt. It doesn’t dim the effect too terribly. You take a leisurely second to lick them dry, watching him watch you through your eyelashes.

Then you set the cup down and resume scrubbing blood from the deck, because that’s your job, and you’ll be damned if you’re going to give Karkat an excuse to chew you out for incompetence.

“You, uh, you really don’t have to do that,” Dirk murmurs, sitting back on his haunches and taking a long drink of tea, attempting to cool himself down, still about as stupefied as though you’d just backhanded him across the deck.

“Beloved,” you sigh. “For someone who places, accurately or not, such faith in my capacity to self-actualize, it’s rather silly and a wee bit hypocritical to assume I’m not capable of deploying my formidable talents in this arena entirely under my own volition.”

“That was a lot of words.”

You shift your posture, roll your hips just slightly, cant your shoulder in to turn your body to a fluid shape, more an invitation than anything, and hold that pose for a second.

“And all that to say, Dirk, does this congealed fish blood make me look sexy?”

He laughs so hard that he nearly upends your wash bucket, and you smile at him until he gets a handle on himself.

“Dude, you have no fuckin’ idea.”

“I’d hazard a guess that I have some idea, dearest.”

This gives him a second’s pause, until he registers your mildly shit-eating grin and snorts.

“Need any help?” he suggests, rolling over to inspect your work.

“Almost done,” you say. “Seriously, I’m getting awfully good at mopping up blood! I’m really excited to get to the proper piracy bit. I’ll be so well-suited to clean up after us when we commit a great many violent crimes for money!”

“And to hear Roxy tell it, you’re terrifying with a gaffhook.”

“Not to rustle your skirts, but I can dissemble a fish carcass rather handily, too.”

“We really are a multitalented couple of guys.”

“Mm,” you agree, shooing him away as you pour the remainder of the washwater on deck to get a better idea of the success of your scrubbery. “The tales of your boudoir derring-do in Roxy’s haul song did not escape me, either.”

He groans exaggeratedly and rolls away even further, as though in his death throes, sprawling on his back with a cartoonish frown.

“I knew you two getting all buddy-buddy was going to go horribly for me. What’d she tell you? Gods, you know about Gamzee, there can’t be anything worse in my storied past than the clownfucking, that was a low point…”

Satisfied that you’re not going to be dressed down for failure at deck duty, you give a place between the deckboards that’s been giving you trouble a last firm scrub and call the job ‘done’. Dirk has settled down in a dry spot, and you seat yourself beside him, letting yourself relax for the first time in quite a while. You ruffle his hair as though he’s a large and terrifying housecat, and he presses his face against your knee and sighs.

“Everyone I’ve talked to today’s had nothing but good things to say about you,” he murmurs.

“Oh, really?” you say, a little surprised. “I think I freaked Nepeta and Aradia out a bit.”

“You can freak ‘em out as much as you want if you keep answering all their questions and dragging in halibut besides.”

“Good,” you sigh, humming in mild relief, leaning back against the hull, which has been warmed by the sun to a nice temperature. You like that about black-boarded Aetrian warships. Always cozy on deck, hard to see the bloodstains, very snappy and stylish as well as practical.

“Even Vriska -”

“Vriska?” you interrupt, aghast. “What could I have possibly done to impress her?”

“Didn’t flinch when she hooked a fish out from under you? I couldn’t say, man, I’m just the messenger.”

“Oh.” You relax and resume playing with his hair.

You’ve been awake for long enough that an evening nap - frankly, just going the hell to sleep - is starting to sound like a treacherously inviting prospect. If every muscle in your body didn’t hurt like the dickens, you would hoist Dirk fully into your lap like a human blanket and doze off to the gentle rocking of the boat. As is, you’re quite content with your fingers twined in the soft, dark hair at the nape of his neck, feeling more than hearing the pleased little sounds he makes as you stroke him from the occipital lobe of his skull to the crest of his cervical spine.

He has such pretty bones.

It might worry him, to say this aloud. You’ve learned the trial-and-error way that most people find it rather unsettling to have a funerary artist of your stylings comment on their skeletal quality. But it’s true. He does. You smile, imagining to yourself what he would look like without all the flesh and trappings.

That’s a little dark, but the answer is, ‘every bit as handsome’.

“What are you thinking about?” he asks.

“Oh, you know. Normal things, a regular amount,” you say.

“Cool.”

“What about you?” you ask, tracing a line from his jaw to his chin, then back again. “What’s going on in that ruggedly good-looking head of yours?”

“Horses.”

You frown for a second, trying to get a better look at his face to discern whether or not he’s messing with you.

“Just… horses?”

“Yeah, it’s a whole thing. Takes my mind off less innocent trains of thought. And then along different ones. Gods, horses are so fucking awesome.”

“Would that we could have passed a few more days in Aetria,” you sigh. “I had a stable full, you know. Well, shared with Janey, of course, and she was more talented with the business. The countryside is awfully lovely, though. You didn’t get the chance to see even a fraction of it before well and truly burning the place down! Ah, imagine, I could have packed a picnic for us. We’d have taken a ferry to the mainland, our gallant steed in tow. Hm, we’d need a strong ol’ charger, that’s for certain, one that wouldn’t balk at our weight. Probably Best Part Of Waking Up.”

“Is that… his name?”

“Yes? I think it’s a reference to some kind of coffee drink or something, he’s a beautiful bay, seventeen hands and some change, muscular as anything, softest wuffly black muzzle you can imagine, a lovely fellow once he gets to know you, awfully fond of carrots. I would introduce you, of course, and he would be standoffish at first, but he’d warm up quickly once you fed him from your palm.”

You trail off, lost in memories.

“Fuck, I love horse names,” Dirk sighs. “Tell me more horse names.”

“Alright, huh, there was… Janey’s palomino mare, You Get What You Pay For, she’s terrifically pretty, very delicate in the face. Mother has - _had_ , sorry - a whole rotation of pure black horses, she liked the effect. There was Ashes To Ashes, Coelacanth, Tragedy Of La Ansephemine, a few that don’t translate very sensibly, er, Pleasures Pain… oh, and one called Remember My Name, which I always found rather delightful. The mare I rode up to join you at the docks was Midnight Rendezvous, she’s mine. Was. I suppose she belongs to anyone who finds her, now. I hope they take good care of her, she’s a sweet girl. An awful sucker for a sugar cube or two, very easy to win her over. What a good horse she was.”

“Wow,” Dirk says, shifting so his head is resting on your thigh and he’s gazing up into your eyes. “Horses.”

“Horses indeed!” you laugh. “I wish I knew how to go about getting one for you out here. They’re lovely beasts. I’ve always liked them a bit too much to be any kind of talented rider; one has to be willing to push his mount to the limits, and I used to get weepy and ridiculous about it, ha ha, annoyed the living daylights out of my instructors!”

“Really? And here I thought you grew up not giving a damn about anyone,” he says, reaching up to cup your face affectionately for a moment. “Where’s my rotten-hearted morning star now?”

You shake your face away and frown at him.

“I like animals. Horses and fish and the deer and whatnot you’re supposed to hunt all princely-like, they’ve never done a thing to me! I tried, believe you me, but it just made me all sad and mopey and no one likes me like that, and can you blame them?”

“Don’t take that the wrong way. It makes sense, I mean, I just… you’ve got layers, dude, that’s all.”

“Turns out I love you and value the quality of your lunches more than I enjoy not hurting fish,” you sigh.

“Aw, I’m flattered.”

“As well you should be.”

The blood has mostly washed off with the hours of scrubbery and whatnot, but you frown down at your free hand, regardless.

You wonder if poor ol’ Best Part Of Waking Up made it safely through the coup, and whether anyone will bring him carrots anymore, what with you sailing off for good, never to return. It was hard enough to leave the first time! There’s a whole lot that went unsaid between you and Jane. What, you wonder, now as you have many times over the last month, will become of your collection of skulls, the extensive library tucked away in a room of your quarters? You only brought a few books with you. The rest will likely be sold off at some point in the rebuilding effort.

None of your accomplishments of the day feel quite so large anymore. The horizon, from where you rest, is impossibly vast and empty, the sky cloudless and cold and blue.

Dirk nestles closer, and you resume petting his hair. You’ve made your choice. You chose him, you _chose_ him, and that counts for a whole damn lot in your book. A whole person you can talk to, a brilliant man with a heart of gold who sings to you, who loves you, that’s worth at least a hundred horses, two libraries, a bajillion ornamental skulls. Animals don’t talk outside of your books, few can sing, and whether or not it’s ‘kink shaming’, you’re pretty sure you couldn’t fall in love with one.

“I love you,” you tell him, very seriously, having done the math.

“Whoa. That’s kind of crazy, dude, because I love you,” he murmurs, kissing the closest available surface, which is your stomach, to which your blood-soaked shirt is currently plastered.

Damn your aching muscles, you pull him up to proper kissing height, an activity which has never been more urgent than in this exact second. He tastes like salt and blood, but he’s warm - why is it so damn chilly out here? - and he’s pliant in your arms, which will never stop surprising you in the best way possible, what with his rough-and-tumble appearance and the strength you know is coiled in his limbs.

You kiss him with all the certainty you want to have about everything else, but can only really claim on the topic of _him_.

“Jake,” he says, as you pull away to breathe. “You - you have no idea how hard I’m fighting the impulse to beg you to flip me like a halibut.”

“A noble fight,” you tell him. “Because that would be ridiculous.”

Then, you flip him like a halibut, which gets easier every time, as you learn the proper ways to leverage his height and weight to get him where you want him.

Here is where you feel more certain than anywhere else in the world, straddling a familiar body, hips flush with yours. They could be any hips, but you’re glad they’re his. After so long in his exclusive company, at least in this respect, you know him better than just about any one person. It’s indescribably comforting to know what he likes and to know with complete confidence that you can give it to him, when everything else is so new and difficult and inconsistent.

“Dirk,” you say softly, leaning in, shifting your weight - he gasps, right-o - “shall we take this downstairs?”

Thankfully, Feferi is on watch overhead, and she typically has the propriety to ignore your occasional on-deck shenanigans. Regardless of the propriety-attribute you are currently exhibiting, which simply can’t be helped, as you are a gentleman in love! 

Being in love is a really excellent excuse for a lot of silliness. If there were anyone else in the world worth loving, other than Dirk, you like to think you’d have given it a try sooner.

“Good Gods, yes,” he says.

One thing that you never would have believed that you could have gotten used to, and yet, shockingly enough, you have, is the sheer amount of talking Dirk likes to do before having any kind of sex. It’s frankly quite excessive, endearing as it is that he’s so adamant about not exploiting you!

And yet, here you are, half leading, half dragging him down to the cabin, starting the damned conversation yourself, because you might as well, and... why lie, it’s fun to throw him off a little bit.

“So,” you whisper, closing the door behind you and pressing him against the wall, pinning his hands, using the cramped space to your advantage and preempting his typical attempt to hop into bed in his grubby deck clothes. “What do you want to do?”

“You know damned well that’s what I ask you,” he complains.

“Turnabout is fair play.”

“This - ah! - doesn’t feel very fair.”

You adjust your positioning just slightly, pushing his legs apart with a knee, not quite high enough for him to cant his hips and gain any but a whisper of friction. Pressing the rest of your weight against his torso, you can feel it acutely as his prodigious musculature twitches and tenses as he wars with the twin impulses to restrain himself in accordance with your guidance and to take what he so clearly wants with his far superior strength and physical skill.

After all this time being partnered up and whatever the hell, you’re very confident that he enjoys this sort of treatment enough to let you do just about anything you want, however tenuous his grip on himself might sometimes _sound_. Especially as you suck at the swell of his throat, making a game of it, tracing little hearts against the flushed skin of his neck with your tongue piercing when you rise briefly to breathe.

“Dearest, sweetheart, beloved,” you say, as syrupy as you can manage without reverting fully to the Voice that always seems to trouble him so much, “I thought you enjoyed fifteen minute conversations while all desperately riled up? Was I mistaken? Not many words happening, disappointing as that is.”

“Fuck you,” he gasps, as you take a moment to nip at the tendon that tightens in his neck, not quite drawing blood, but very much eliciting the intended noise. “And don’t make a fuckin’ innuendo - ahhhh - out of…”

“It would hardly be an innuendo,” you laugh, nudging your knee up slightly higher, enough to actually brush between his legs, lowering your center of gravity, and releasing one of his hands, as you need yours to grip him by the small of the back and grind him closer to you. “More an agenda item.”

He makes a pleasantly incoherent noise, kisses the side of your face gracelessly as you lean in and work.

“My love,” you say, turning to meet his lips briefly with your own, dragging your foremost tongue piercing across his lower lip with a flick, “my darling, sweetest honeycomb.”

“Stop that,” he protests, muffled slightly by your mouth over his.

“Certainly. Turn around, now, if you’ve nothing else to say.”

He groans, and the sound is half arousal, half annoyance, but you’ve become well acquainted with Dirk’s more mundane interests as well as his boundaries. He stops you when you lean too far into what he recognizes as a performance, because it makes him feel like a client - alright, that’s understandable, he’s certainly something else at this point, and it ought to be special with him. That makes perfect sense to you! Then, of course, there’s the matter of repartee. He’ll accept a great deal of your more traditional bedroom conduct when it’s couched in a dialogue, especially when you frame it as a challenge.

Dirk, bless his heart, loves a challenge.

And as is evidenced by the near-eagerness with which he complies, he doesn’t have a problem being told what to do, either. Rather enjoys it, in fact, and struggles, sometimes, to extricate his enthusiasm for taking orders from his ardent hope that you will come to treat lovemaking as a sincere and sacred soul-baring covenant between the besotted and express some independent preferences of your own.

Truly, as though you wouldn’t notice precisely what he wanted of you!

That’s practically _all_ you notice, half the time.

You let your steering grip on the curve of his ass go slack, tracing your way down and forward to caress his hip, tracing along the crest of his pelvis, your short nails dragging slightly against the fabric of his loose-fit pants. Simultaneously, you bring the arm of his that you’ve been keeping immobilized against the wall down, gently but firmly twisting it behind his back.

“Sh,” you murmur, “that’s the ticket, hm?”

At first, you only skim over the waist of his pants, dipping lower over their drapey fabric to assess, without words, where he’s at. His breath hitches and the muscles of his lower back seize as you deftly palm what is, indeed, unignorable evidence of arousal.

You linger just for a moment, because then you’re back to teasing with feather-light touches, close-but-not-close-enough, holding him to you and kissing the sensitive place behind his ear, from where you can feel the noises grow and die in his throat as he struggles not to fully release them.

Finally, you dip below his waist in earnest, shifting fabric aside and grazing his dick on the way to enter him, just barely deep enough that your fingers are slick enough to properly touch him in a more sensitive area. Not that he couldn’t take the rougher stimulation. You just prefer to do things right, and you’ve done this often enough to know exactly what ‘right’ is.

Humming encouragingly against his neck, you slip forward slightly, shifting focus to his dick, which is hard and hot and wet as the rest of him. His heartbeat throbs beneath your fingers as you begin to circle him, applying the kind of steady pressure that would be just deliriously pleasant, if you would only shift it to the head.

He whines against the wall. You don’t think you’ll ever get tired of that, his going all wordless and needy beneath you. From someone typically wound so tight as your beloved, it’s among the highest compliments you can imagine!

You hold him for what must be an agonizingly long time, circling relentlessly, pushing his face against the wood grain of the paneled wall as you suck fresh marks into his neck over faded ones. He whimpers and twists quite enticingly beneath you, and you adjust yourself, hands-free, thank you very much, so that he can feel just how _engaged_ you are in the proceedings. 

Not that you haven’t been hard since the moment you pinned him, not that you couldn’t get yourself up with a thought half the time. He would rather not think about that. It’s not something you can simply unlearn, but you can avoid reminding him about it, and you do.

You tighten the circling motions, closing in on the head of his dick, shifting the orientation of your grip until you are rather mercilessly stroking him in his entirety with each gesture. The musculature of his powerful thighs tightens, and you grasp his pinned arm ever more firmly, throw your weight against his shoulders to force him not to shy away, and maintain the pace of your ministrations with punishing consistency as he twists and spasms.

As he comes, you bite him in another tender place over his carotid, and he grits his teeth around a moan until he can no longer suppress it. The sounds that spill from the lips of your dear, stoic, imperturbable boyfriend are positively delicious, and you give serious thought to the idea of turning him back around so you can catch them with your mouth.

Instead, though, you stick to your mental itinerary and hold him fast as he jerks and twitches through his orgasm, easing back slightly from the swell of his dick, but not entirely abandoning it, either, resuming your slow circling pace.

“Jake,” he pants, as articulate as a man can be in the throes of passion, his face pressed into the wall, “aaaaah, Jake, that’s… fucking… hhh… s’ so much.”

“Tell me to stop,” you suggest, sucking lightly on his earlobe, now. “I’m listening, my darling. You can call it quits whenever you like.”

You know full well that Dirk will allow you to stab him to death before he’ll concede that he can’t take something, and true to form, while a whine builds afresh in his throat, he neither asks nor forces you to cease tormenting him.

Holding him there is a challenge. He’s damned strong, and he’s a twitchy devil, too far gone to make this easy for you. You’re grateful for every second of deck work and every fiber of muscle on your frame as you draw his state of quivering sensitivity out, brushing slowly back towards his dick every few strokes, feeling him shudder every time you come too close. You are positively relentless. He is incoherent.

After a suspended minute in time, then another, you relax your grip on his arm, let it fall to his side.

“Hands against the wall,” you whisper. “Hold tight, dearest.”

He complies shakily, and you reach forward with your newly freed hand, close your grip around his pelvis, and once again shift your focus to his oversensitive dick.

While his hips immediately buck away, you prepared for that, and you push right back, unyielding, keeping him in your grasp and massaging at the hardened flesh even as he shakes and cries out with excessive stimulation.

“I’m… fuck, fuck, _fuck_ ,” he swears, and you can all but hear his teeth grind as he tries not to bite off his tongue.

The noises he’s suppressing now are sobs, not moans, and his fingers curl against the dark wood of the wall, and he shudders into a second orgasm with a strangled, near-unidentifiable sound.

You’re prepared to continue if he is, but he slackens against you and murmurs ‘no more’.

Taking a moment to lick the taste of him from your fingers, you, with some effort, turn his boneless collapse into a careful descent to the bed. The panelling of the wall has left a line imprinted down his cheek, and he doesn’t seem to be able to open his eyes.

You caress his face, wipe away a tear welling up on one side.

“Can you take just a little more, beloved? Changed up, just a little?”

He nods wordlessly.

Gently, you divest him of his work pants and shirt, the easier to tuck him in to bed once you’re done, and pull his underclothes down with a hooked finger. You kneel in the limited space between the bed and the door, and run the hardware of the tip of your tongue over his softening dick, just to see him convulse.

“Gods, oh fucking Gods,” he slurs, as you finally press two exploratory fingers inside him, finding him, perhaps predictably, amenably wet and relaxed.

After tonguing at him a little more - it is just so sweet, the way he squirms! - you stand and undress yourself. He doesn’t react even slightly. The poor dear is all tuckered out.

“May I?” you ask, positioning yourself at his entrance, looking up expectantly for his reaction.

“Fuck yeah,” he mumbles blearily.

You really, really like him like this. Like everything, but especially like this, handsome as a storybook hero, mussed and undone before you, willing to take anything you can offer. He is really something!

With minimal ado, you take your own pleasure, easy enough after all the action before. He makes agreeable sounds as you fuck him, but doesn’t move, still blissed-out and exhausted from all you’ve put him through, and presumably the long day, as well.

When you’re finished, without much fanfare, you kneel again to finish things off, cleaning him out with your tongue, noting that he’s no longer quite as twitchy, that he cants his pelvis to meet your lips rather than jerking away as though from an open flame.

“Round three?” you offer with a quirked eyebrow, and he laughs tiredly.

“Come to bed,” he counters. “Cuddle time.”

Obligingly, you dry him off with your discarded shirt, clean yourself as well - the sanctity and cleanliness of the bed is of utmost importance! - and tuck the both of you in, cozying him up so his tousled forehead rests against your chin.

Perfect height for gentle little kisses.

“I love you,” he mutters into your clavicle. “I love you so much.”

You take a second to open up the parts of you that you set aside during all the sex business, and you find a whole goddamned well of love and gratitude and appreciation for the man in your arms.

“I love you too, Dirk. Rest up, now.”

Smoothing the bleached blond hair from his brow, you kiss him delicately, again and again until his body shakes in laughter.

“What’s that for?” he asks.

“Do I need a reason, other than that I love you?”

“Shit, never,” he says, and nuzzles your chest.

While it seems for a second like he may have dozed off, he looks up after a while has passed, interrupting your vague musings about a whale you saw overboard a few days previously.

“What did the tea mean?”

“Did I not make myself clear?” you say teasingly, ruffling his hair and kissing him some more. “No, no, I kid. Ha, alright, pomegranate is about temptation, implies that any of the other notes are to be interpreted as invitations. It’s like a modifier. You read the fruit first, if there’s a fruit. Black tea is about intensity, and the extent to which it’s been steeped characterizes the intensity and nature of the message. So that’s a double-steeped, achingly sincere invitation from the get-go. Then you’ve got hibiscus and rose. Flowers are the hard-to-discern ephemera of the message, the specificities one has to parse out. I did get those right, didn’t I? Hibiscus and rose?”

He nods, wide-eyed.

“Yes, both of those are ‘red’ flowers - red solicitations, desire but heartfelt. Hibiscus specifically denotes something occurring out of bounds. Depending on the context, that can mean anything from outside of class boundaries or literally outdoors. Given the other notes, especially the twice steeped black tea, I’d be inclined to take it to the letter. Now, rose is a tricky one. Fresh is different than dried, different colors can be discerned by a refined palate. I happen to know that we only have dried red rose petals, processed to a powder, which gives it a more forward position in the bouquet and the color confers a sort of… more substantive taste, I would say? It’s like the difference between dark and light meat on a game bird.”

“And it means?”

“Well, it’s… roses are used to indicate time. The timing of a hypothetical rendezvous, the duration of an affair. Preserved, though, in this particular way, they indicate timelessness, eternity, that sort of thing.”

“Oh.” He smiles. “Well, that’s what I meant.”

“You want to have sex out on deck... eternally?”

He snorts, scooting up in bed to plant a kiss on your cheek.

“Sure. I was riffing on the ‘eternity’ thing. Now and forever, morning star.”

From his new position, it’s easy for him to lean up to kiss you. You open your mouth slightly, let him trace and toy with your piercings, as he is so fond of doing. The movement of metal in your body reminds you that you inhabit it. That this is really you, inside of this thing made of meat. What a concept!

You may never get used to the way he looks at you, like he’s looking at you and through you all at once. He breaks away and does it, gives you that _stare_ , and your face heats up uncomfortably.

With all the distractions now concluded, you’re reminded that every part of your body hurts rather terribly and that you’re unbelievably exhausted. Luckily, the same seems to be the case for Dirk, who has no further energy for conversing, nuzzles down against your chest, and lapses into sleep, his breathing steady and even.

Tired as you are, you feel oddly restless, and you finagle your way into the tiny bedside table to find your notebook and a writing implement.

You should really get to writing that ‘thank you’ ode to the Sea King. She did you quite a solid. That’s probably it.

Dirk snores softly, and the boat rocks like a cradle as you stare at a blank page and consider whether anything rhymes with ‘tentacles’.


	3. The Sea King's Song [Instrumental] (or, friendship is magic?)

The sea is calm and the sun hangs low overhead in the cloudy sky, its warmth barely enough to counteract the chill that slows your progress in splicing a damaged line, hunched over your work, Aradia at your side, supervising intermittently over your shoulder. It’s a peculiarly familiar position, the friendly coexistence of her company paired with the moderately challenging task, could be any suspended moment in time you’ve passed on either of the Black Diamonds. There’s a peace to it, of course, but also an uncomfortable deja vu.

You’re looking forward to making landfall, suffice to say. Something to interrupt the way the impossibly long days stretch on, only to snap back into each other like a rubber band stretched taut.

At least you’re starting to get the hang of this particular work enough to hold a conversation around it, and as usual, you’re bothering everyone around you with questions about the Sea King. Aradia, you figure, is your best potential source of really serviceable songwriting information, since most of Dirk’s expertise is either culturally specific or heavily tempered with his wholly understandable adoration for the prodigiously multipoded demiurge.

“Look, jackass, the Sea King already has a song. It’s called ‘The King in the Sea’, and it’s the best shit ever. You’ve heard it, for fuck’s sake.”

Karkat is only briefly passing through, clipboard in hand, on the way to convene with Sollux at the helm as to matters of course and all that, but he catches you mid-solicitation and not with any particular affection to the intonation, either. He’s been a little stretched-thin, you think, visibly so, with the impending return to the Velvet Court. His onshore responsibilities substantially eclipse those of the rest of the crew, so that does make sense, but it doesn’t make it much easier to take.

You’ve been working on not flinching too dramatically when he raises his voice in your general direction. It’s harder when you can’t just block out everything he’s saying and let it wash over you as uninterpreted words; sometimes he’s yelling something important, and that complicates the process tremendously.

This time, you hyperfocus on the words and pretend that the tone is just background noise. It mostly works. From where you’re sitting on deck, a pile of rope to splice in hand, you hold your place, barely even twitch, and nod appropriately when he seems to be done.

“I think it’s sweet,” Aradia counters. “Besides, he asked me, not you.”

“I, ah, was thinking,” you say, “that I don’t know a lot about her beyond the octopus deal and a few grandiose claims courtesy of one Dirk Strider. It just doesn’t make for a very good song, y’know?”

“Also, nothing rhymes with ‘tentacles’,” Aradia agrees, looking up from her own section of the mangled rope. “It’s an age-old dilemma. Wait. Denticles. No, that’s much too… diminutive-sounding. And I don’t imagine most cephalopods are denticulate, though you’d have to ask Feferi about potential exceptions. Wait, _have_ you touched her tentacles? Oh, you _definitely_ have. What was that like? Spare no detail, I’ve always wondered.”

“Hm.” You try to call back the memory of the night a few weeks past, your only real conscious interaction with the Sea King’s, er, molluscopomorphic appendiges. “Slick, I suppose? Quite chilly. Not especially slimy, though you wouldn’t expect that, would you. Suckers, but she’s not grabby with them.”

In your last fishventure with Roxy, you caught a particularly unhappy orange octopus, which turned out not to be caught on a hook at all, but to have simply hitched a ride up and found it didn’t quite appreciate the view from the deck. You’re not sure how to explain to Aradia, who was not there for the struggle that was getting the damned thing back in the water, that it was really exactly like that, but bigger and far less vexatious.

“Fascinating,” Aradia says, leaning back contemplatively against the mast.

“Certainly! So, if you could fill me in on the mythos, I mean,” you say, gesturing helplessly with the rope.

“Hm. I suppose I am the lore specialist, as it were,” she says contemplatively. “Well, each King has a divine purview beyond their elemental orientation. The Dead King, for instance, is a noted seer, capable of reading the fate of any entity, mortal or otherwise; the Star King, as you’re well aware, can manipulate her own spatial positioning and that of others at will.”

You nod along with this.

“So, what’s the Sea King’s deal, outside of all the oceaning business suggested by the name?”

“Her… deal, of sorts, is altering the ebb and flow of time.”

“Oh! Very cool.”

“Yes,” Aradia laughs. “Cool indeed. Try not to pull the freshly spliced rope taut so immediately, give it more of a shimmy until you’re certain that the fibers are correctly oriented.”

Adjusting your grip a bit, and attempting to lighten your touch slightly, you ease the ragged ends of the rope together and begin to twist.

“Looks good,” she says. “This makes her quite the sought-after deity. It takes, as I’m sure you know, five years devotional service to guarantee an audience with her. Hundreds annually pledge themselves as Acolytes of the Deep in the hopes of gaining her blessing. For the very few she chooses - I’ve only ever personally known one who was ultimately successful in endearing themselves to her - she suspends their mortal body in time, allowing them to live the richest possible life prior to joining her in the deep for an eternity in her many, many arms.”

“And you knew someone who managed to get themselves chosen?”

“In a sense, you do as well. You met the operator of Starlight’s End, correct?”

You wince.

“Briefly, yes.”

“No need to make that face. She’s not as scary as she fronts to keep order in her establishment.”

“How does the Sea King end up with a… well, an innkeeper, I mean, among her chosen? I would think she would have a preference for the pirate-y types, based on how passionately she spoke for the life,” you say, frowning.

“You’ll have to ask her yourself,” Aradia says, shrugging. “The gist of it is, though, she doesn’t age and she can’t be killed by any means that wouldn’t also kill the Sea King, which isn’t meteorically easy to accomplish, though I suppose your countrypeople would be better suited than most to give it a try. Prior to our most recent adventures, I would have thought it an impossible proposition to even harm a God, let alone kill one.”

“Interesting,” you say slowly. “That sounds like rather a good deal, all things considered. A quite remarkably good deal. And what exactly does one have to do to fulfill their part of the bargain?”

“Can’t say I know, exactly. Seemed presumptuous to ask her about specific terms.” Aradia shrugs expressively and glances down at your handiwork. “That looks good. You’re improving. We may even be able to use this one, if the situation comes to it.”

You grin.

“Excellent! I guess I’ll just have some questions for Miss Maryam, once we make port. I can do a fair bit with what we’ve got in the mean time. Now, you say ‘may’. What did I goof up with this one?”

It turns out that your error with this particular rope is rather easily remedied; you looped and tucked the loose ends of the damaged rope, first, through the parted fibres of the undamaged portion a little too early, and it’s just as likely to unravel if it comes under too much stress. Disappointing as that is, you spend a half hour unravelling your work, and a further hour repeating the process, far more neatly in this permutation, according to Aradia’s specifications.

Even this endeavor was not particularly urgent; for the last few days, the ship has been edging closer to the coast, closing in on the Velvet Court, passing volcanic rock formations and stark island landscapes, in shallow waters shielded from the worst of the increasingly capricious early winter seas.

“Is there anything else I’m supposed to do this morning?” you ask Aradia, and she shrugs again. “If that’s a ‘no’, er, can I trouble you for a few hours with that guitar of yours?”

“Any time! You know where to find it, don’t you?”

“Sure do,” you say with a grin. “Thanks again, I deeply appreciate your insight!”

“Aw. If you want to make a duet of it, you know where to find _me_ , too.”

The thought no longer completely paralyzes you, but you still feel a horrible deep-tissue twinge in the pit of your stomach at the thought of sharing something like that, even something meant to be shared, even knowing she wouldn’t laugh, even knowing that you could - that you have thrown Aradia into the worst situation that you can imagine, and she still inexplicably seems to enjoy your company. She can forgive you for that, for all of that, and she doesn’t even - there’s nothing about you she could reasonably want! No possible ulterior motive to any of it.

It’s profoundly uncomfortable.

You want it to not be. Really, you do, you want to grin and clap her on the back and ask if she’ll accompany you to the bow, maybe help you out in the writing process, since she’s got such a proclivity for it. Really.

“Thank you,” you repeat, somewhat weakly, instead, hoping that your smile is not too chagrined. “I may just take you up on that!”

Ugh.

She pats you on the back and disappears aftward, in the direction of the wheel. Outside of your workspace, the deck is dotted with crewmembers in varying states of occupation and relaxation. Nepeta appears to have joined Karkat in the crow’s nest, and she waves down at you when she sees you looking around.

You wave up, as is friendly and appropriate, and Karkat scowls, though there’s a pretty good chance you just caught him mid-scowl. Nonetheless, you hurry belowdeck to retrieve the promised guitar. Dirk warned you that he likely wouldn’t be about much today, that he and Vriska would be in a vital pre-landfall meeting, discussing course and strategy and probably trying to poison each other, for old time’s sake. Well, that’s fine, you’re quite capable of entertaining yourself, and you can say that rather sincerely, now!

Instrument in hand, you settle yourself down in a relatively secluded spot, as much as anywhere on deck can be called anywhere even adjacent to private, and sound your way through a few scales to get started. One trick that you’ve learned for songwriting is that it’s tremendously easy to restructure lines when stubborn words defy rhymes; ever more tremendously, it turns out, as you grow more comfortable in Common spoken conventions as opposed to purely literary usage, heh.

Some sorts of syllables are very simple to rhyme. Good long-sounding vowel and hard consonant combinations. The ‘ait’ in ‘wait’ and the ‘ame’ in ‘name’ and the ‘ight’ in ‘right’ and all that. Not so much the ‘entacles’ in ‘tentacles’, which will certainly have to be couched in the middle of a phrase. Hm, ‘sharp’ is a hard one, too, not much to work with, there. Harp, tarp… LARP… that’s pretty much all.

You temporarily set the instrument aside and tap thoughtfully at the half-filled page of your notebook with the blunt end of your pen. At this point, it’s dead-zero lyrics, just ideas. You have a go at sketching some tentacles, but they end up looking rather spaghetti-esque. Dear god, what you wouldn’t do for some pasta. The novelty of freshly-caught fish has almost entirely worn off, and you would commit some truly heinous crimes for any meal you might recognize as familiar.

At least it isn’t forever. There’s an end in sight, a set of volcanic mountains, blued-out by distance, on the horizon. This trip has proceeded both impossibly slower and comparatively far more quickly than the initial journey to Aetria, which is pretty fucked up, you think. 

That said, it makes sense that a God of the sea would be disposed to meddle critically with the flow of time. Long months… weeks… literally any duration of seafaring activity sure does bring a hammer down on the part of the brain responsible for knowing what fucking day it is. Not to mention the anxiety of maintaining a cover while urgently acquiring all manner of skills. Less cover now, really, but just as much anxiety, of a slightly different flavor.

You set your notebook down, slipping your last pen (you’ve a talent for losing them) safely inside the binding. Working out a tune should make the songwriting easier, anyway. You can work within boundaries! You’re a motherfucking virtuoso of figuring out the rules and dealing with them. It’s the blank page that’s confusing. It’d muck the whole notebook up if you just started writing all willy-nilly and it turned out wrong. And then where would you be? You’ve only got one notebook.

Strumming contemplatively at Aradia’s guitar, picking out a particularly auspicious note here and there, you hum your way through a few bars of what might be a decent chorus. The sea is flat and glassy, a vast blue-grey mirror, as the Black Diamond II cuts through the water. You’re borne forward solely on whatever winds some subset of the crew solicited from John, that dear fellow.

Mid-riff, you miss a note, frown at yourself, and resume your fingering position.

Certainly that’s not any arrangement you could ever have _any_ business weighing in on. It is simply the height of rational self interest, in your professional opinion, service in exchange for service. That said, you do rather appreciate that the Sea King seems disinclined to those sorts of gentlefellows’ bargains, if you’re being honest. 

It _does_ make you like her more, though that seems like a peculiar contradiction, since usually your favorite kind of people are those easiest to tempt into the boudoir. Because, at the very least, they are honest. Honesty is easy to work with. Everyone has something that they want from you, and it is so much more simple if it is just _that_ , if you can just get it out of the way and addressed and tucked aside, a point or several in your favor from the get-go.

Hm.

Perhaps it is simply because you are In Love now? You haven’t really thought much about how that vitally important factor will change your relationship with literally everything, especially randy strangers who possess things that you want. 

The main bearing of your paired-offedness on your interactions with the crew (your entire world of late) has been that you receive slightly more lenience in matters of your ineptitude and, er, moderately antisocial and questionably ethical dealings that might-or-might-not have nearly gotten them all killed a while back. Who is really to say what would have happened? Certainly not you.

But where previously the vast majority of problems could be solved quite handily by, er, charming your way out, and the vast majority of goods and services could be handily obtained by charming your way… in, you’ll probably have to be more deliberate in those sorts of matters, once you’re on land. At least you are pretty sure that most problems can still be solved by making sort of beseeching expressions at _Dirk, specifically_ , though that tactic should only be trotted out in truly dire straits, such as when you want something and do not have it.

Yes, you have really figured this all out quite splendidly. You have never had an issue before with people being acquisitive of others’ bodies, and why the devil would you start in on that now? You are merely a little hesitant at the prospect of, well, rebranding, and surely a little bit of trepidation there is entirely normal. What if you slip up? That would be quite bad. Of course you don’t want to think about it too much, of course it upsets your stomach just a tad. You are not a man of especially strong constitution. It is no one’s fault but your own. Things have always worked that way for you, and now they don’t anymore, and you shall simply have to grin and bear it as a neutral, lateral move.

There are probably a dozen other motivations for your appreciation of the Sea King’s vague overtures of friendship. Maybe several dozen! It is nice to be liked for such bizarre and seemingly counterintuitive reasons. A novelty more than anything. You wonder how long it will last before she recognizes her error in judgement of your capabilities or else simply grows tired of you.

At least you can have sex with Dirk. Confusing as _his_ affection for you sometimes still is, he’s got no tentacles to contend with, in terms of rhyming or in any other respect, and wow but that suits you just fine.

That is a pleasant thought, actually, how he no longer seems quite so reticent about enjoying your company in the bedroom. You’re downright pleased with yourself on that count, probably more than in any other sense of your expanding array of nautical talents. He trusts you, sort of! Enough to cease and desist with the relentless monologuing and permit you to do what you do best. You figure him and his personal rules out more and more thoroughly with every passing night, and since you started up with the whole fishing dealio, he’s gotten quite comfortable with your attentions.

Thank the fucking heavens for that, in the beginning you were near to going stir crazy with worry. You really should not have. He may have some damned unaccountable reasons for favoring your company, and those, you are coming to understand, are called “love”, at least in his estimation ( _you_ have perfectly rational reasons for loving _him_ , _he_ is the one who you think has probably lost whatever marbles he has left after all the poisonings) but some of what he likes makes perfect sense.

Now you are going to stop thinking, you decide, and stare pensively out at the horizon. Land would be awfully pleasant beneath your feet. You’ve been saving a clean outfit for shore, nothing too terribly special, but you are damned excited not to be a grimey heap of fish scales and deck goop anymore, that is for fucking certain.

Oh, and for a bath. A proper bath.

You would kill several people for a bath, messily and with your bare hands, you’re pretty sure. You’ve really been psyching yourself up for that, the murdery bit of the piracy, though that hasn’t happened near as much as was initially alluded, and you sort of wonder whether you’ll have lost your touch on that, too, as a function of catching the Love Brainworms.

Back to strumming and not thinking. Better that way. The sun, of late, isn’t ever getting high enough in the blue cavern of the sky to do anything about the morning’s chill, and fog is beginning to cling and persist like a blanket over the calm sea. Perhaps that means the Sea King is not too busy.

A tune is sort of slowly percolating through your aimless dicking around, and you resume humming to give yourself a little direction. Eventually you’ll need to learn to read music properly, get better with notations and whatnot. You were always so damned incompetent in formal musical instruction, which would have been an apocalyptic blow to your prospects in your chosen profession if you didn’t have a very good ear for tunekeeping and a talent for hand-eye coordination in low stakes situations. Sigh.

“Hey, you alone out here on purpose?”

Once again, you miss a note, nearly drop the guitar in your haste to correct your posture and turn around. It’s Roxy, smiling a bit awkwardly.

“What? No, not especially - may I be of assistance in some way?”

“Whatever you’re plucking out sounds pretty good,” she says. “Don’t let me stop ya! I was just wondering. Fef’s cooking tonight, can’t mess up a stew, and I’ve got fuckall to do.”

“Please, by all means, I’d welcome the company,” you say, realizing after the fact that you’re not entirely lying.

Roxy’s helped you through three rounds of fishing, none quite so auspicious in catch quality as that first halibut, though you brought in another sablefish and one massive crab at one point, both of which were delicious. It’s been nice, spending more time with her, in her element and increasingly in yours.

It’s not so much that you really can’t stand fish death and blood and whatnot. It’s a lot more complicated than that. Roxy’s approval, when it feels justly earned, outweighs literally any ethical or personal considerations on your part, and she is very generous with it, which you appreciate. She seats herself a few inches from you, moving your notebook as she does so. It ignites a little twinge of discomfort, that she would touch it, but how would she know? You don’t react, at any rate, don’t even stiffen like you sort of want to. Just get right back to playing and humming a little, though more carefully, now, with the thought that she might be scrutinizing it.

The longer you work at the tune, the clearer it gets, the more you can play around, add little flourishes, without losing your place. After a few minutes, Roxy’s presence is no longer a high-beam light of distraction, more the unobtrusive glow of a salt lamp, a comforting gleam through the bedroom window, not bright enough to wake you up, barely enough to read by. That is, until she begins to hum along with you.

Her voice is really lovely. Especially humming, it comes from her chest, low and throaty and always flawlessly on key, she has an ear to more than rival your own. As you improvise on the guitar, feeling her presence palpably but not uncomfortably in the song, she begins to harmonize rather than sticking to your tune.

The melody itself starts out low and a little ominous, as close as you can get to the sort of minor-key villain-y flavor without really going all-in, slow and deliberate. The chorus is a bit punchier, more clearly heroic-sounding, a complement to a refrain that will definitely include the word ‘tentacles’ at least once. Fun and lively as a good oceany song ought to be. Then back to near-dirge, then lively and spirited again in the next chorus. Roxy picks up a few notes lower than your tune and follows you as you hum and play. It sounds an awful lot better than your voice alone over the thrum and pluck of guitar strings.

After a good few progressively more coherent verses and choruses, you cough and lose your place, your guitar accompaniment abruptly petering out.

“Never heard that one before,” Roxy observes, patting you on the back as you cough a few more times. “How long’ve you been sittin’ out here, bud? It’s getting too cold for this shit.”

“Just wanted to get the tune ironed out,” you explain, a tad hoarsely. “It’s a whole thing, for the -”

“Oh, right! You were telling me - oh man. The Sea King song you’ve been rolling around. Pentacles! That was what I was gonna say to you, been sittin’ on that one for a hot sec, like fuckin’ pentagrams, but on tarot stuff. There _is_ a rhyme!”

“Does, er, does the Sea King have a lot to do with pentacles?”

“She’s goth as fuck. I mean, that’s the vibe, right? It’s an option, that’s all! Let me tell you a story ‘bout a gal with hella tentacles/teeth in her mouth and a deck fulla pentacles. Look, I’m not Dirk, I can’t rap, but I can sure try.”

“Teeth in her mouth indeed,” you repeat contemplatively.

Roxy snorts.

“Fiiiine, not my best work, got me there.”

“No, I think it’s quite a valid observation! She has so many of them sometimes, but not always? It is quite a noteworthy feature by all accounts. Hm. I was just bothering Aradia about lore, you know, I’ve picked up a good bit about her in the last few days. The tune’s quite come together, but the lyrics will take some more time.”

“Ha, and time’s her thing, ain’t it. Well, we’ll probs be in port for a while. I bet Karkat’s gonna want you to learn the ins and outs of fencing locally if ya can, but in between, you should get plenty of good ol’ fashioned r-and-r on shore.”

“Sounds awfully nice,” you sigh.

“What, y’mean it beats sailing in, tied to the mast?” she snorts.

“Dunno. You were good company, even then.”

“Awww. Back when I still thought you didn’t know what the fuck I was saying. Nostalgia, Jakey baby! My heart’s warmed as fuck just thinkin’ about how far we’ve come.”

You’ve been focused with laserlike precision on your finger positioning, so it’s almost a surprise when you look up and see Roxy hunched over against the deckrail, staring out into the misty horizon with a faraway look in her eyes. You suppose her tunekeeping is instinctual; in some people it just is, after all. By all appearances, she seems to be looking for something.

It isn’t at all a lie to say that she was good company, despite your perfectly justified concern that she would poison you, as she had explicitly threatened. Roxy is always pleasant company, even with the threat of a painful semi-death looming. She talked to you despite your ostensible ignorance, let you play a bizarre and elaborate form of charades to keep you comfortable. Told you affectionate but blood-drenched stories about Dirk that, at the time, terrified you, but must have been her way of processing the fear that you could have killed him. _Would_ have, really. Would have done _anything_ , killed _anyone_ if you thought it would get you home, a leashed king in hand.

Most of them were kind to you, to be perfectly fair. _Karkat_ saved your hide, hilarious as that is to consider. You should probably try to be more charitable to him. His bark, you’ve learned time and time again, is worse than his bite.

“We’re coming up on the elephant rock,” Roxy says, after a long second of silence that you are reluctant to break. “It’s pretty cool. You can’t really see it from this angle, but when you do - you ever seen an elephant?”

“No ma’am, can’t say I have.”

“Ugh, guess I’ll have to sketch you one!”

This, finally, is enough to force you to react. You reach for your notebook before she does, seeing the movement coming from a mile away, and grimace slightly.

“That’s quite alright!” you say, too quickly to be natural. “I’ve seen illustrations, I’m rather a fiction buff, actually, a great fan of some lovely works that included some excellent copperplate etchings though I suppose I’d thought them as fictional as dragons, haha, they’ve got the funny noses, am I correct?”

“You got sexy drawings in there?” she laughs. “Hey, no worries, tell me to fuck off if I’m being too grabby-hands, its cool.”

“I - I just didn’t think to bring a spare, is all,” you say, feeling something at the intersection of intense relief and equally intense confusion. The more you dig, the more all of your crewmates are enigmas to you. You’re not sure what she _should_ have done, but it’s _not_ …

It’s not smiling over her shoulder, putting a few more inches of space between you, leaning over the prow with a gesture meant to direct your attention to a rocky outcropping in the distance.

“Keep an eye on that one,” she says. “Lemme know when you see it, it’s super obvious from the right angle. Elephant rock means almost home.”

“That’s nice,” you say quietly.

Home is a nice idea.

“It’s okay, y’know, to be weird about your stuff,” she adds. “Not that it’s weird at all. I think it’s kinda normal, actually? I’m still the same way about my gun. Fuckin’ love my gun, man. Nobody but me puts hands on her, they’d mess her up. At least that’s how it feels. Took her off one of the bitches Vriska hooked while her and ‘rezi were busting us out of the galley. First thing that was mine in a long time. It’s _normal_. I bet everyone here’d have the same kinda story about something.”

“Well, I hardly liberated my notebook from a damn slaver,” you laugh.

The corner of her mouth twitches, but she doesn’t say anything. You know this expression well. It’s one of Dirk’s favorites. It typically means he is gearing up to say something perhaps a little patronizing in an attempt to lead you through to _his_ particular understanding of some benign aspect of your circumstances. Which is not terrible, you can talk circles around him all night if he wants to, you know what you believe, and no amount of moderately condescending back-and-forth is likely to change your mind any time soon, though you’re happy to pretend once you get bored of it all.

Roxy doesn’t press the issue, though, goes back to staring at the misty horizon.

“Okay, there,” she says. “See?”

As the ship moves down the coast, the elephant begins to come into view. Waves have eroded what looks to have once been one massive rock to the point where a tunnel passes through it in its entirety, leaving the immense weight of the thing supported on two rocky pillars, like front and hind limbs. A spindly third protrusion juts from the front, similarly torn through by the persistence of water. On one side, at least, the odd bulge of the rock suggests an ear.

You’re still very far away, so it must be an immense structure, to be so clearly visible, even in the fog. The downy layer of white over the sea gives it a sort of ethereal, storybook kind of feel to it, like a giant or a golem in slumber.

“Wow,” you breath. “That’s uncanny.”

“There’s loads of cool formations around here. We’ve got maybe a day left. Like, there’s this one volcanic peak that, I swear, it looks exactly like some kind of fortress, all these huge struts of rock jammed together. I hope we make it there while there’s still light, man, you’d love it, it’s sick as hell.”

That reminds you acutely of a novel - most things do, if you’re trying to make connections. But in one of your favorite serials, the sort you’d put down weeks’ worth of pocket change to bribe away from tutors, concerned a fellow with supernatural powers, fallen to earth from a distant star, who disguised himself as a humble scribe and intermittently performed heroic feats for the benefit of the planet that took him in. He had almost precisely such a fortress, on an uncharted island in the middle of the ocean. Of course, there were no ships involved, as he could fly. Excellent pictures, though.

You’re not exactly proud to say it, but you have always really loved a good illustrated work of fiction. It’s such a shame when a story’s made up exclusively of words, when there’s so much more to things. Elephant-shaped rocks and islands of solitude and your dear friend Roxy. You can see all of them, clear as day, without the veil of _language_ to obfuscate what’s true.

She _is_ your friend, you think, watching her gaze out thoughtfully over the water. In the months since you left the Velvet Court, her hair has grown out, the roots as dark as Dirk’s beneath the bleached ends. Either would suit her, really. Her eyes are black and clear and focused, and you wonder what she’s thinking about, what she sees. Maybe she’s reminiscing about the cool mountain she just described. That would make sense.

Trying not to be too obtrusive, you resume plucking at the guitar, returning to your tune to make sure you’ve got it memorized and then seguing to some songs you’ve been working on. Aradia lent you a few sheets of music, including some simple tunes to accompany ‘Mary Mac’ and ‘Finnegan’s Wake’, two classic tavern songs that she suggested would be useful to know.

“Did Dirk tell you the one about our village and the Sea King?” Roxy asks, unprompted, and you look up.

“I don’t think he did,” you say. “I’ve mostly heard legends and tales of ambiguous badassery as explanations for the tattoos.”

“Gods, he’s a hoot, ain’t he,” she laughs. “Maybe I didn’t hear it at home. Coulda been one of the other islanders on my first ship that passed it along. But it’s a good story. So, the village me ‘n Dirk come from is pretty well-known for being peaceable. Like, full-on pacifist to the max. It’s one of the reasons our ships sometimes get targeted. Kind of a big reason, actually. There’s some complicated philosophical stuff about it. Blood begets blood, whatever. It works out for the most part because the waters surrounding our shores are like, almost totally unnavigable without a bajillion years experience. Loads of hidden rocks and shit. We were just really hard to invade, and as long as we could make it home, any ship tryna pull one over on us and follow would pretty much inevitably get fucked up in the process, just not by us.”

You nod agreeably, resuming your quiet playing as she speaks, which doesn’t seem to bother her at all. It’s always exciting to hear more about where Dirk comes from, and you hate to ask him about it, since you’re pretty sure he wouldn’t let on if it was painful or unpleasant to talk about it, so you just… don’t. But it makes sense, that if he were rejecting the social norms of home, pacifism would almost certainly be on the list. How terrible it must have been, to feel like kindness and nonviolence themselves were barred to him if he wished to live as his own man. Or how pleasant, whatever, how liberatory. Sometimes you wonder if you really understand him at all.

“So there we are. Li’l tiny fishing village, basically zero defenses except for the ocean itself. One day, a bigass ship chases one of ours down. Cannons up the wazoo, nearly got us, big ol’ chase scene, that kind of thing. Smashed to bits on the rocks, but fucked us over a bit first, really whaled on our ship. Eventually, some fuckers in huge galleons show up flying the same standard, but they don’t even try to land on our shores. A little down the ways, there’s an easier cove, totally unoccupied since it’s basically underwater in the summer. But this was the winter. Did I mention it was the winter? Yeah, it was winter. I wasn’t actually there. Does it sound like I was? I feel like I’ve told this story way too many times.”

“I think I follow,” you interject, and she smiles toothily.

“Rad. Fuck yeah. Anyway, like three giant warships spill out onto this rocky little beach, making camp and all. And a few scouts head out, and it’s like, shit, they’re putting together a wholeass invasion. There’s more than enough of them to take out our entire fucking village, like, everyone. Wiped off the map. Can’t get us by sea, gotta go by land. And they’re really going to do it. They’ve finally come to finish us off. Everybody flips their lids. We have to make a run for it, obviously. Pack everything into the ships and just go before they mobilize. Except one of our ships is fucked from the last attack, and there’s no way to fit everyone. People start _really_ freaking out. People start panicking. People start praying for the time to finish mending the boat.”

“That seems a roundabout way of securing your existence.”

“Well, yeah, that’s kind of the deal, though. Pacifists. Even if you’re like, walking out of a meeting where someone sincerely stood up and suggested that everyone over fifty stays and gets fucked, everyone else crowds onto the boats you’ve got and leaves them behind to die… even the kind of people who put you in that situation, no matter what, they deserve to live and you’re not even going to _hope_ something horrible happens to them. Even as you’re mentally saying goodbye to, like, your grandpa, you’re still not gonna wish them dead.”

She sighs, looking at you, now, not the distant mountains or the elephant rock, which no longer looks like an elephant, just a rock, brown and rugged where it juts out of the sea.

“Anyway,” she continues, “the Sea King wasn’t having any of that shit. Middle of the night, the tide pulls all the way out. Like, miles of bare sand. Empty. We’re prepped to evacuate, even more than usual what with the invasion thing, so we do. Everything we own, brought up to high ground. Luckily, there weren’t any vessels out to sea. When I say everything, I mean _everything_ , ships included, dragged up hand over hand. But the assholes planning to make slaves of us weren’t islanders, weren’t familiar with the area and the danger. After the wave came, there was nothing left of them but a few sticks of driftwood. The Sea King protects her people. Dirk’s right, she’s a fuckin’ badass. Completely the best king, by like a mile, don’t tell John I said that.”

The wind whips briefly across the deck, slackening the sail incrementally in the process and ruffling her hair into a mess. She laughs as she shuffles it back into place.

“I thought…” you hesitate. “I thought her whole thing, more or less, was helping those willing to try to help themselves.”

“To be fair, I wasn’t actually there,” Roxy says, shrugging. “Maybe someone straight up walked into the waves with a spar of wood and was like, ready to try ‘n walk over to take the fuckers out alone, and they said a prayer for strength, and she was like, damn, better wreck those bitches before this little dude-and-or-gal gets their ass handed to ‘em. But I’ve always figured it was more of a nuanced kind of thing. Like, the wind favors luck, the stars favor those willing to look for them, death favors sacrifice. I obviously don’t know the Sea King too well, she’s never shown up and handed me even _one_ fish, let alone two. But I got heaps of stories from my days in the galley, and in every single one of them, she’s got one hell of a sense of poetic justice.”

“Huh.” You don’t really know what else to say.

“I dunno. I like the idea, though. Someone lookin’ out for us. In our corner. We all go home to the Dead King eventually, and he’ll welcome us with his weirdo boney arms, but in the meantime, the Sea King’s making sure shit’s a little more fair in _this_ world, not just the next one.”

She shivers slightly.

“Fuck, it really is getting cold.”

Wordlessly, you offer her your shoulder. Neither of you are exactly dressed for the weather - three months at sea will change the circumstances more than you were strictly reckoning when you packed - but she’s still warm and soft and squishy, like a person.

A person who seems reluctant to get comfortable. You can feel her supporting most of her own weight, at an angle that must be devastatingly unpleasant.

“Come on, now, there’s no way that’s doing you any favors,” you say, a little awkwardly.

“We friends enough to cuddle?”

“I think we met that threshold by the second or third time I nearabouts tumbled overboard trying to gaff an overenthusiastic fish and you caught my sorry ass,” you laugh.

“Helllll yeah,” she says, grinning. “Leveling the fuck up. You ‘n me.”

“Can’t imagine a better way to bond than mutual traumatic fish murder followed by singing and storytelling.”

“Yeah, we could market this method. Write a book. Step one: share a gruesome but necessary task, ideally while singing. Step two, sing some more, while not necessarily drenched in blood. Step three, confirmed bffsies, get your snug on.”

“In only a few short months, you, too, can reach a substantive level of comfort with casual intimacy, incurring minimal emotional damage in the process,” you snort. “We can quit piracy and retire for good. We’ll be rolling in wealth. I think we’re onto something, here.”

She nuzzles into the crook of your arm, her side flush with your side. It reminds you, gut-twistingly, of the way you used to pal around with Jane, before things got so strange and unpleasant between the two of you. She was once every bit your match in the physical affection department, and she certainly was never getting any of that from your mother, who wasn’t much for the stuff. Janey herself was never one for making new friends, either. You wonder if she’s alright out there, chasing after your ship through the icy seas. If she’s cold. Whether someone is looking after her.

Probably not. She’s too good at taking care of herself to let anyone else half-ass it.

“Y’okay, bud?” Roxy asks. “Got a little stare-off-into-the-distance-y there.”

“What? Of course, yes. As far as being okay goes, I am simply… the okayest there is.” You pull her a little closer. “Besides, you’re one to talk. So far as the distance-staring goes. Look, whatever the middle distance did to incur your ire, bro, I think you’ve thoroughly psyched it out. What with the staring and all.”

She snorts. “Guess we gotta amp this friendship up, gotta grind that skill some more or whatever the fuck, before either of us is gonna be honest about that kinda shit.”

“S’pose so.”

“This ain’t bad, though.”

“An excellent start,” you agree. You really do like snuggling up with people, and not just - well, it’s complicated. It’s very complicated, and better not to consider it. You like what is happening, at the moment, and that is theoretically what matters.

It’s never really quiet on the ship. Wind strains at the sail, even the still water makes a sound as the prow gently parts it, deckboards creak and voices, muffled by the aforementioned deckboards, filter up from below.

“I don’t think I’m ever gonna stop pirating,” Roxy says.

“Hm?”

“You sort of alluded to that. Like, piling up a heap of coin and quitting. Retiring. Maybe it was a joke, idk. But I don’t think I’m ever gonna stop. I’ll be geriatric and shit, and I’ll still be wavin’ my blunderbuss all over the place, makin’ a small army of little Roxys drag me around for what remains of my life of crime on the high seas.”

“How come? I mean, it’s possible that I simply have not yet become acquainted with the promised pleasures of the business, but I’ve been under the impression that what we’ve all been experiencing is rather the cushiest possible iteration of a pirate’s life. And even this, I find rather difficult to swallow at times. I understand not wanting to wither away on a fainting couch, somewhere, but at the same time, I -” you gesture helplessly at the shore, distant and barren and so close, yet so far. “Dry land! Food other than fish! I wish I could say I got the ‘why’ of it. P’rhaps I will yet, with time.”

“Would it be dumb to say I’m good at it?” she snorts.

“Not in the slightest.”

“I am, though, like, actually,” she adds, after a few seconds. “Like, I fuckin’ love working for Vriska, but if she ever hung up the hook or whatever, I’d feel like a waste if I stopped. ‘Cause I’ve just put so much time into getting good at this kinda thing. Basically my whole life just adds up to this. Can’t squander that shit, right?”

“Difficult as that is to argue with,” you say, “and likely as it is that I am not an especially authoritative source on this matter, I can’t imagine there being anything that you are not spectacularly good at.”

“Aw, you’re a sweetheart.”

“I’m really not,” you sigh.

“Who the fuck actually is? Who’s actually anything?”

“An excellent question. Haven’t the foggiest how one might go about answering it, but you’ll be the first person I call for should I ever be in danger of figuring it out.” You hesitate. “Is something wrong? I mean, are you quite alright, Roxy?”

You can feel a wince building up preemptively. The fact of it is, you probably don’t have much to offer here but a pat on the shoulder and a static listening ear. It’s nigh impossible to serve from an empty vessel, and your metaphorical vessel, as it were, is hardly seaworthy, barely done falling apart and taking on water and all that, nothing anyone would rightly want to be served out of, even if there _were_ any good words of anything stored in it.

Growth mindset; nothing anyone would want to be served out of, _yet_.

Still, you wish you could say something helpful.

She nudges you good-naturedly with the side of her head, sighing like she can hear your inner monologue.

“Eh, I’m truckin’ along just fine. I just get all up in my feelings sometimes on the way back to the Velvet Court. Lotsa big emotions associated with the place. P sure everyone else is in the same metaphorical boat, along with the literal… yeah. I dunno, any time you come home to somewhere it makes ya remember all the other times you came home there, and all the people you were.”

“Oh,” you say. “Huh. I guess that makes sense.”

Now you’re both quiet for a while. Long enough that the sun begins to set, slowly and languidly, slipping down into the mist and partially behind the horizon. More a fadeout than a proper sunset. A steep gradient from grey to blue to a burst of brilliant yellow behind the distant mountains.

Roxy’s breathing evens out, and the warmth of her body makes it possible to stay where you are, even when the last of the sunlight dissipates and the chill of the fog and the constant wind begin to weigh on you. From your vantage point, propped up against the deckrail of the prow, you can see how deep and sunken the dark circles beneath her eyes are. The cook, you suppose, must be up early for the preparation of breakfast, and Roxy is typically among the last to go to sleep, as well. You know she and Dirk get a lot of comfort from their late night chats in the galley kitchen.

Shifting slightly, you judge that she is properly asleep, and with just a little finagling you can balance her weight somewhat more comfortably across your chest. This is nice. Really nice. Hardly weird at all, when you think about it. Maybe it wouldn’t be as dreadfully uncomfortable as you fear, asking Aradia to join you for a proper duet next time.

You’re looking forward to a next time, even with the Velvet Court barely a day’s sail away. How bizarre!

As has become familiar in moments of rest, after some interval of calm, a sharp voice pierces through the stillness that has settled over the deck.

“Hey! English, if you’re not too busy with your urgent afternoon naptime appointment, we need you downstairs,” Karkat calls from the doorway between the deck and the steep stairway to the inner ship.

Gingerly, you lift Roxy out of your arms, jostling her by the shoulder to rouse her from her slumber. She objects a few times, tripping blearily over the words, but smiles slightly as she wakes.

“I’m headed belowdeck,” you tell her. “Maybe you ought to get some shuteye in your own bunk, hm? It’ll be warmer down there.”

“ _You’re_ warm,” she complains, but she finds her feet along with you as you pick up Aradia’s guitar and tuck your notebook into the waistline of your work pants.

“Not warm enough, I’ll say,” you reply, stretching, your extremities stiff with the cold and recent disuse. “Hope dear Feferi’s stew lives up to your expectations, I’m chilled to the bone and right starved to boot. For no especially good reason, either.”

“Feelings talk is a fuckin’ workout,” she says, elbowing you gently in the side.

“When you’re right, you’re right.”

“Hey, fyi, the song sounds good as fuck. Lemme know when you get some of those lyrics down, huh? Fuckin’ pumped to hear ‘em. Dirk says you’ve gotten really good at it, and the subject matter’s so far up my alley it’s technically located in a totally different zip code.”

“He did?” you ask reflexively, biting back the impulse to request his exact words relayed in confidence, to the letter.

You don’t think he’d ever lie to Roxy.

“Yeah, babe.” She pulls you into a side hug as you near the belowdeck door, her eyes sparkling with mischief. “Kinda like your grandma saying you’re handsome or whatever, I guess, since he’s too head-over-fuckin’-heels to see past his own smitten-kitten romance-o-vision, but I still trust his taste. You turned out to be okay in the end, didn’t ya?”

“I certainly hope so,” you sigh, smiling reluctantly as you part from the hug to climb down into the narrow galley hallway, a bit of a job with Aradia’s guitar slung over your back.

“When I’m right, I’m right,” she echoes, reciprocating the smile and half-waving as you head for Vriska’s cabin, where you understand everyone has been holed up all day.

Catching your breath and recollecting yourself, you knock at the door, and are a model of put-togetherness by the time Karkat opens it, ushering you in.

You don’t spend a lot of time in Vriska’s quarters, and that’s deliberate. Not because it isn’t quite nice - all of the rooms in the ship are rather fine, relative to the original Black Diamond, in your professional opinion - but because Vriska makes you nervous, and you tend to make a fool of yourself in front of her, and it’s not as though you pal around frequently in quarters other than Dirk's, to begin with.

It’s modestly more spacious than Dirk’s stateroom, even with three people already crowded inside. More dark wood paneling covers the walls, and her rack of poisons and assorted alcohols serves as decoration for an entire side of the room. You ignore those completely, taking in the scene you’ve walked in on. Dirk has his head in his hands, his elbows propped up on the table typically used for course-setting, and Karkat resumes standing across from him after letting you in.

The chart table is littered with empty bottles, and also somewhat littered with Vriska, who is practically sprawled out over it.

“Good, you’re here,” she observes, her single dark eye flickering to your face in recognition, a slight slur to her tone. You wonder how many multiples of her own body weight it took to get her to this point - Vriska has a patently superhuman alcohol tolerance to match Dirk’s. “Fuck landing parties, fuck unloading this stupid ship, fuck every single piece-of-shit vendor in the Velvet Court, and fuck Karkat in particular, ‘cause he _crossed me_. There, now you’re all caught up from today.”

“Dude, he didn’t - I’m still not sure where you’re gettin’ this, but what we’re not gonna do is randomly start shit with our main point of contact for basically everyone with a handful of gold in the fuckin’ court the day before we make landfall,” Dirk insists, his intonation suggesting they’ve been over this somewhere in the neighborhood of eight hundred times. “Everybody’s goin’ a little sea-crazy, let’s calm down and -”

“Of course I fucking crossed her,” Karkat interrupts, turning from Dirk to Vriska. “And I’ll do it again. I described proper balance-maintaining offload strategy for a ship of our size, based on a conversation I had with Sollux while you were literally in the room, if you’re not too syphilitically brain-rotted to hold onto basic concepts of linear time along with a clearly tenuous grip on informal social agreements. That _abundantly_ qualifies as crossing, and probably mutiny, too, when the captain is a raging jackass.”

Vriska slowly nods agreement.

“He’s right, it does. We’re like, on the same page about all that. Also, ‘f you tell me to calm down again, Strider, there ain’t gonna be enough of you leftover to bait your boyfriend’s hooks.”

“Try it, bitch,” Dirk sighs, almost affectionately, no particular conviction to the retort. “Alright, let’s take five and stop freaking Jake out, maybe, since I’ll remind you both, he’s the only member of our crew without a dedicated role in our unloading schema, and that’s the entire point of him being down here right now.”

“Oh, I’m quite alright! Abundantly un-freaked, in or out,” you maintain, freezing halfway out the door, arrested in your effort to slip away.

Just because you know your way around high-volume family discourses that only vaguely concern you but inexplicably require your presence doesn’t mean you especially enjoy them, or ever have, or ever will. Though you easily slip back into your polite, attentive posture, and your best ‘definitely listening’ face, without even consciously trying, once you’re caught.

“It’s cool,” he says, smiling across the cramped chamber. “Won’t take too long. Karkat floated the idea of bringin’ you with him for your authenticating schtick, once we start moving cargo around. It’d just be a day’s worth of meet-n-greet, get you used to the run of the place, charm the gold out of some tight-fisted sons of bitches. Play good cop bad cop with shouty, here.”

“Do I get to be the good cop?”

“You were born for the role of dramatic foil to this cranky asshat. Yes. Abundantly good cop.”

“Splendid! Just point me where I need to go,” you say, relieved at the seeming lack of argument from the other two parties in the room as well as by the prospect of having a clear job in the day to come.

Dirk gestures, indicating you, as he turns back to Vriska.

“See? Easy. Honor is satisfied, nobody’s stuck sittin’ around lookin’ pretty all day, Karkat’ll keep them out of trouble, you get to go shoot the shit with Terezi, everybody’s happy.”

You smile emphatically, prepared to defend this conclusion if necessary. Everybody being happy sounds like a great idea to you.

“Ugh. Fine, I’m out, it’s dinner time and I’m getting pickled just standing near you,” Karkat huffs, stepping around you on his way out. “Find me on deck tomorrow morning, English, we’ll get this show on the road.”

There’s no animosity in his tone. None that you can make out, anyway. You really do like Karkat, when he’s not shouting. It’s the shouting that you maybe sort of have a little bit of an inexplicable thing about, for no reason. But, hey, tomorrow is a chance to shore up your relationship, perhaps even impress him just slightly! Everything Dirk’s described about the job sounds abundantly within your wheelhouse, after all. You are going to knock this one out of the park, you’re certain of it.

And you’re going to be back on land. There is both novel and exciting food and a proper goddamned bath in your future. The voyage back to the Velvet Court has to come to an end for something else to happen, and you’re ready, this time, to make sure it’s actually something decent. Your hands are free and in front of you, though you’re wringing them a little nervously even after the slight tension dissipates from the room with Karkat’s exit.

“How’d I do?” Vriska asks Dirk. “Honest opinions. Won’t hook you. Cross my heart.”

“I thought that went pretty well,” he says, shrugging and leaning back in his seat with a long-suffering sigh. “Baby steps, huh? It’s hard shit, changing how you do things.”

“Rum helps, I think,” she snorts.

This doesn’t feel like a conversation that involves you anymore, and you begin to edge back towards the way out.

“Hey, thanks for being so flexible,” Dirk says, looking up and meeting your eyes before you can retreat. His smile is warm and reassuring. “S’just going to be a bit of a shitshow until we get everything unloaded. New ship, new procedures, packed hold, plenty of headaches to go around even now that we’ve just about made it.”

“No problemo!” you say brightly. “Exactly zero problemos! Roxy clued me in on the plan in advance, no surprises here. Hey, ah, d’you want me to head out and bring you two back some grub? There’s stew to be et, and I’d be all too happy to, er, go. And get some for you.”

“Maybe not right away, but you should eat,” Dirk says, shifting his chair closer to Vriska’s seat. “We got some more shit to talk about, I think. See you later, okay?”

You nod, very excited to not be part of this conversation anymore. You need to return Aradia’s guitar. Urgently, in fact. And the promised stew is calling your name, in the way that only ‘stew’ and ‘something else to do’ truly can.

“You’re doing okay?” Dirk adds, after a second’s pause.

“Oh, sure as sugar, right as rain!” you reply, finally, _finally_ making your daring escape, with a little wave to emphasize your okayness.

He frowns slightly, but is quickly distracted by something Vriska says, and you close the door behind you.

Alright, perhaps you have found an aspect of ship life that you do not much enjoy. At the same time, you entirely understand, now, why the crew geared up to drink themselves silly prior to landing at the court the last time. Vriska has rather the right idea when it comes to intoxicants, you think.

The stew is quite good, and made better by the fact that it is likely the last exclusively-fish meal you’ll be stomaching for a while. Despite the undercurrent of tension, everyone’s spirits, at least around the galley table, are buoyed by the proximity of land and home and an end to the long journey. Six months away is longer than most of them have passed almost entirely at sea in quite some time, and it’s heartening to be assured that this sort of trip isn’t entirely normal.

You politely bow out from the planned revelry, as the crew begins to move up to the deck and Aradia retrieves her guitar. Morning will come early, and if you’re going to thoroughly charm Karkat and everyone you encounter in the Velvet Court with your overwhelming competence and aptitude, you’re going to need some rest.

The denouement of an adventure is always the worst part, you think to yourself, the slowdown, the ‘what next’, the ending of it. How you hate endings.

Alone on your side of the bed, you curl up against yourself beneath the soft duvet and hum through your tune a last few times, rolling over, in your head, what it might be like to live suspended in time, to hold onto at least one thing with total confidence even as the world shifted around you, as worlds are wont to do.

Hm.

That’s an idea, isn’t it.

You fall asleep alone, to the gentle rocking of the ship and the strains of music and laughter filtering in from abovedeck, and dream, as you sometimes do, of drowning.


	4. Better Days Coming (or, once more to the Velvet Court)

In your dream, your _immulatio_ are heavy as iron shackles, and the moonlight is a barely-visible glimmer from beneath the roiling waves. It’s there, the milky white light, though your glasses have long since fallen around your neck, and they’d be useless underwater, anyway.

You can’t even try to fight your way up to it. Your wrists, your ankles, your neck - all dragged inexorably down. Something catches fire, and now debris is raining down through the water, the surface lit up almost blindingly, out of your reach, and your lungs are full and useless, you’re choking, darkness is edging in, hazing your vision, and you stop struggling. You stop trying to breathe. You let it take you.

Gasping, you jolt into consciousness, fists tight in your sheets, breathing - yes, you’re breathing.

It’s very early in the morning, and for once in your sorry existence, you’ve woken up before Dirk, only a faint blue glow suggesting the eventuality of sunrise illuminating the stateroom, casting shadows across his face. He’s fallen asleep on top of the covers, which is probably for the best, since he’s still in deck clothes, though they’re not in terrible shape, since he was indoors for most of the day.

The dream fades out, and contentment, more or less, fades in.

Stretching languorously, enjoying the thought that you are _on top of things_ for goddamned once, you extricate yourself from your nest of warm sheets and shift around a bit, resting your head on his shoulder. He smells like rum and smoke and salt, and his breathing shifts his chest in a regular, comforting, rhythmic sort of way.

If you woke up like this more often, the only sounds permeating the silence the quiet creaking of timbers, low seas shifting the boat so gently as to be nearly unnoticeable, you would expect to miss it dearly upon your arrival in the Velvet Court. As is, though, it’s rare that you get to enjoy the lazy fade-in of a morning with him. He is uncompromising about accepting the maximum survivable level of responsibility onboard. No slacking, on your account or any other.

You look up, watch his expression, more relaxed in sleep than it ever is while he’s awake, for a moment, and then bury your face in his neck, which wakes him up.

“Hrrmph?” he sort of mumbles, his arms closing around you as though it’s the most natural thing in the world. “W’time is it?”

“Early,” you say, directly into the warm skin of his neck. “Go back to sleep, love.”

“Don’t wanna. Missed you yesterday.”

You laugh, pulling away just far enough to press a line of close-mouthed kisses along his jaw, until he shakes with laughter, too, holds you tight to his chest and rests his lips against your forehead. There’s no joke. It’s just good to be with him, again. Sometimes you forget just how good it is, how safe and loved he can make you feel.

It’s remarkable, actually, how easily you can forget. With him in front of you, it’s as though some place in your chest is full and hot with love, liquid and potent and unignorable. You wish it would stay there, that it didn’t seem to leak out, sometimes slowly and sometimes altogether too fast, in even the briefest of absences, leaving you empty and confused.

Maybe it’s not love, if it can slip away so thoroughly without him to remind you about it.

You worry about that, though on a backburner. You have better things to worry about, typically.

For now, there’s no reason to be nervous. Here he is, stroking gentle circles into the small of your back, holding you so close that you can feel his heartbeat in your own chest. Slow and regular, save for moments of great excitement. This is not one of them. This is soft and unhurried, without even an iota of urgency.

You shift up, slightly, to kiss him on the mouth, and he parts his lips willingly for you, and you just - enjoy that, kissing him, the slow heat, the slick pleasantness of his tongue against yours, his lips on your own, all deliciously welcome sensations. Though you are not under the duvet any longer, you feel warmer than before.

“How’s your head?” you ask, breaking away with a slight frown, swiping a thumb over his temple. “Late night, I take it.”

“Ain’t hungover, ‘f that’s what you’re asking,” he complains. “Too badass for hangovers.”

“Sure, darling.”

You move about a bit, readjusting so you can get your hands behind his head, to massage at the suboccipital muscles that stretch down to his interspinal ligament. Dirk carries tension everywhere - literally, _everywhere_ , he has been an utter mess the few times he’s let you at his back - but you know from experience that his neck and shoulders tend to be the worst of it.

He leans into your touch, sighing.

“Feels fuckin’ great. Doesn’t mean I’m hungover.”

“Of course not.” You kiss him lightly on the tip of his nose. “Far too strong for any such thing. As you said. Relax. Sleep if you can. Like I mentioned, it’s quite early.”

“Really?” he says, his eyelashes fluttering open to expose a sliver of his dark eyes. “How long do we have before Karkat starts pounding on the door?”

“Long enough,” you say, very succinct if you do say so yourself, and lean in to resume kissing him.

“Mmm.” He stills against your lips, and you wonder for a second what he is doing, only to find his arms around you abruptly leveraged to roll you onto your back, beneath him. And now he kisses back, of course, deeper and with more intention, though still tinged with the leisureliness of sleep.

You let your hands go slack, twine your fingers behind his neck for support, lean into the warmth of his body against yours. You could do this forever, probably. You wish you really did have long enough for that, for unending hours of his careful, almost reverent attentions to your lips. If you focus, you can even stave off arousal - it takes effort, of course, consciousness you would rather allocate to the gentle way he shifts your lip piercings with his tongue, the deliberacy of it - but you can do that, override the kneejerk reaction and just enjoy it for what it is. Once you’re sufficiently practiced, you can train your body to do almost anything, after all. It takes time, but you’ve had time.

You have had _such_ a lovely time with him, these last few months, and you sigh gratefully at the thought. Wouldn’t it be something, to do this forever, to have him forever. Never to worry about anything else, ever again. You and him, and the rest of the world could do whatever the hell it wanted.

“What’re you thinking about?” he asks, lifting away, gazing down at you through his eyelashes.

“I feel terribly lucky that I get to keep you, that’s all,” you say, your voice heavy with - something, you’re not quite sure what, but that syrupy-thick _something_ that fills your chest.

His lips, flushed from kissing you, quirk slightly into a smile.

“‘M the lucky one,” he sighs, resting his forehead against yours. “Actually, if you want to get technical about it, Vriska is the lucky one.”

“Dear heart,” you say gently. “Ought I to be worried by how readily your thoughts turn to Vriska in this somewhat compromising position?”

“Shut the fuck up,” he snorts, leaning in to kiss you again. “You got me, actual hottest dude in the world underneath me and I’m thinkin’ about boning literally anyone else, ever. ‘specially Vriska. That’s totally a thing. I’ve been lusting after my skeletal ghoul-woman of a captain. You caught me.”

“Mm.” You release your grip on his neck, wriggle around a bit so you can run your hands down his spine lightly, skimming the contours of the network of muscles in his back, all tensed as he holds himself over you.

You _would_ like to talk less, actually, you think. Shutting the fuck up sounds like a home run of an idea.

With your hands otherwise occupied, it’s a bit of a strain, but you pull yourself up by your own abdominal muscles - which you have, you totally have some of those now, though it’s taken a damn sight longer than you anticipated - and you kiss messily at his throat. As though you are overcome by want for him, which you suppose you sort of are?

He groans, hunching down to make it easier for you, and you hum approvingly, grazing his neck with your teeth, just the suggestion of a bite, calling hot blood to the surface of the skin without breaking it, tracing the flushed area with your tongue.

Bolstering himself on one arm, he reaches up, pulling out of your reach and running a fingertip over your lips.

“Tell me what you want, morning star.”

Meeting his eyes, you smile.

You’ve been working on your smile, which sounds worse than it actually is. All that really means is that you pay attention, particularly, when something happens that calls one out of you organically. Aradia praising your spliced line, a particularly lovely sunset, catching Roxy humming your tune last night over dinner, basically anything Dirk does, you _pay attention_ to what your face does, which is a good thing, and now you can do it whenever you want to, exactly the right way.

His own expression warms and softens, and he reorients himself over you, bracketing you with his thighs, and leans in to kiss you in earnest. Perfect. You can feel his heartrate climbing, with his chest against yours, though most of his weight is still resting on his knees, giving you leeway to shift about as you reciprocate the kiss.

“I want you,” you whisper, and that part is true. There is no way in the world that you don’t want him. All of him, yours, forever. All his love. Everything he has, everything he is, you want it. You would keep him all to yourself inside of your chest, if you could. Somewhere safe. Somewhere you could be sure of him, could swallow this sense of sureness he gives you, you _want him_. You don’t want this to change when you make shore. You don’t want to lose him. You’re not sure you could survive without any part of him. You might starve to death.

Something about the way you say that makes him chuckle, and you flush, can feel the blood rising to your cheeks.

“Tell me how,” he prompts, his tone low and quiet. It reminds you of the first few days on the ship, when you stumbled for seemingly endless hours through conversations about _likes_ and _dislikes_ and _proclivities_ that, while they were surely meant with your best interests at heart, and while it was wildly novel, being asked, were best compared, psychologically, to having all of your fingernails pulled out.

You swallow, feeling the cartilage bob in your throat. Cast your gaze down to buy yourself a little time.

Luckily, that doesn’t seem to be what he has in mind, because he pins you by the hips, by his arm across your chest, forcing your own arms down to the bed.

“Like this?” he offers.

He won’t - would never do anything else, go any further without a ‘yes’ that rings sincere, but fortunately you’re very good at those, as well. And you’ve talked about this, cagily, but… you like this, you kind of circumspectly told him so, you more than don’t mind when he takes the reins a little bit, sometimes. Wouldn’t want it every time, but sometimes it makes things easier. Sometimes it’s all that allows you to really enjoy it. You struggle not to feel a sense of profound responsibility to him, when you’re on the other side of things, which is wonderful, of course - you get to feel as though you’re taking care of him! - but. This is good too. Sometimes. As a reminder.

Admitting that was rather difficult.

In this case, you look inside yourself and find you like it. It is flattering, to be wanted reciprocally by someone you want so much that it hurts. If the idea didn’t twist in your stomach so horribly that you could hardly speak, you might have asked him unprompted, though you don’t know how you would have done it in your own voice. You have the other one, in which you can say literally _anything_ , no matter how antithetical to your self-conception, but he hates it when you use it on him, even though it’s objectively a very useful tool for you.

“Yes,” you say softly. “Please.”

You wonder if this is just a roundabout way of testing him, whether he really does want you. Sometimes you can’t believe it without proof, which is almost hilarious, because you can believe most things, except that people like you for anything but - but your - you’ve got a whole new list of things, now. Knots and songs and fish and conversation and a warm shoulder at the prow of the boat.

That’s how it works, though, right? For everyone, to an extent. People have reasons.Maybe not quite so material. Maybe a little healthier in what they want, what they appreciate, what they allow to be appreciated of them. A little less fixated on the exactitudes. But you’ve been expanding your repertoire, and it’s good to be wanted for those things. It’s always some kind of give and take. And this is _giving_ , canting your head back to allow him access to your neck, letting your arms go slack. And this is _taking_ , when he kisses you and you can practically feel your eyes rolling back as you focus on the sensation of it.

He enjoys it, or he wouldn’t do it. He’s not like you. He’s honest that way.

There’s a lot more thinking to this kind of sex, before it gets going in earnest. You can’t say you like that part about it, much. It’s a challenge not to struggle in his grip. Wouldn’t do a thing, but might prompt him to hurry it up, whatever he’s planning.

“Hey, since I’ve got you here,” he says, his words muffled slightly as he more or less addresses your neck from a millimeter away, “can I say some kind of maudlin bullshit?”

“If you’re quick about it,” you retort. In practice, it comes out as more of a gasp, because he’s got his fingers on your piercings, now, rolling your nipples between his thumbs. The piercings themselves truly don’t do much for you - they add a dimension to being touched, sure, but the corresponding localized nerve damage balances it out a bit - but Dirk is clever with his fingers, and his touch is warm, and you’re sensitive with arousal, and it’s a struggle just to get the words out, frankly.

He pays attention, leans into it, pauses to resume kissing you, open-mouthed, wet and hot, at the juncture of your neck and your jaw. His hands on your pecs remain firm, his thumbs massaging the same little circles over your piercings that had you choking on your witty rejoinder in the first place.

“I’m kind of insanely impressed by you,” he says softly. “Everything about traveling with you has been, like, a complete dream.”

His words tickle on the side of your neck, and you squirm a bit beneath the attention.

“You’ve figured out everything we could throw at you. You fit here on the Diamond, and you fit so perfect with me, Gods, I can’t tell you how much I never want to stop touching you, the words don’t actually exist. You’ve just grown so fuckin’ much, dude. I love you covered in blood and fish scales and deck slime and doing all kinds of insane shenanigans of your own and like, tellin’ me about them when we go to sleep. Falling asleep with you. That’s some real shit right there. Every time I see a little more of who you are, I fall in love with that, too. Everything you can be.”

“You make… an awful lot of impassioned speeches, dear heart.”

“Got an awful lot of impassioned things to say,” he replies smugly, the bastard, and you shiver as he begins to kiss you again, mouthing at the steep angle of your jaw where the body of your mandible branches up to the ramus.

You’re warm from your chest to your stomach, even where he isn’t touching you at all. Intensely hard, so fucking wired up from just his mouth on you, his steady hands on your chest, that you wouldn’t last long at all if he was to acknowledge your erection. You’re sort of glad that he doesn’t. Even more glad when he lifts a hand from your nipple, cards it through your hair, and hauls you in for more kissing.

Focusing on his tongue between your lips, the way he drags it over your own, both heats you up further and distracts slightly from the fact that even the brush of fabric against your dick feels incredible.

That only lasts for so long, but you hold onto it, as tenaciously as you can. He eases up if he feels you trying to take the lead, but you push back, wishing there was some way to tell him that you want him to be right about you, you want to be who he thinks you are, you love him so desperately and so deeply, you want him, it’s the only thing holding you together sometimes, he’s all that makes your place in the world make sense.

You settle for sucking softly at his lower lip, gazing up at him with wide, adoring eyes, which you don’t have to simulate even slightly, that’s all there right below the surface.

“Want something?” he asks, tilting his head, parting from the kiss, his voice rough as gravel.

With his pupils blown out, the shudder to his knees where he has you pinned, his heartrate nearly audible, his breath coming in ragged pants, you think that your being the one to ‘want something’ is an interesting take on the situation, but you smile nonetheless.

“Please,” you breathe. “Touch me, I can’t - I want to feel you when I -”

That gets the point across quite well, you think, and he exhales like he’s just run a damn marathon, his hand briefly tightening in your hair, then releasing his grip, his hand trailing over your neck, up to your kiss-swollen lips.

“Open,” he directs you. “Help me out, here.”

As though there’s anything you wouldn’t do for him.

You part your lips obediently, and he slips three fingers into you at once, holding them there passively until you get the message and tongue over them, suck as much as you can manage without being able to make a seal. You have just about no idea what he’s doing, but you trust him.

“Thanks, babe,” he whispers, withdrawing his hand and slipping it beneath you, bypassing your underclothes easily, wrapping his spit-slick fingers lightly around the head of your dick. “Let me know if I’ve improved, alright?”

Just the first movement of his fingers, tracing with calculated pressure around you, the pad of his thumb massaging gentle circles into the juncture of your glans and shaft, has you nearly biting off your own tongue, throwing your head back to avoid making the sort of noise that he would find unbearably objectionable, might _stop_. It’s difficult not to employ your old bag of tricks, really, not because anything about the hot sparks of pleasure coursing through you is disingenuous, but because it’s all wrapped up, now, not clear what was ever real or fake or anything in between. All you know is that some sounds worry him, and those are the bad ones, so you clamp down on them and hold them in your throat until you trust yourself to get it right.

Exactly how he managed to cultivate this particular skill, you’re not entirely sure. It’s not something that you do much of on a regular basis - not with other, more mutual acts to enjoy. But he goes at it with the same relentless drive for excellence that he exhibits in literally every other aspect of his existence, and even with your best efforts, you come into his palm in about thirty seconds.

It’s more of a relief than anything, even as the pleasure ebbs. Feels nice, feels familiar, the way orgasm seizes at you briefly and then politely lets go. You want to be kissing him again, crushing your body against him. As if he can read your mind, he relaxes his death grip on your hips, drying you with his hand, pulling it away, and allows his weight to rest against you at last.

“Still terrible?” he asks, his voice thick with some indeterminate emotion.

“The worst,” you whisper, and he laughs, letting his chest fall against yours so you can feel it. He’s still thrumming with tension, shivering when you reach around, draping your arms over his shoulders to pull him closer.

He looks a little unsure of what to do with his hand. You resolve the issue for him by shifting about until you can guide it to your mouth. He seems to have come to accept - heh - that this is something you sincerely like doing. And you do like it, the intimacy of it. Anything in your mouth, more or less, you like.

“Fucking hell, that’s still criminally hot,” he sighs, and you smile around him, reintroduce your tongue piercings to the proceedings, and feel him groan.

“What can I do for you?” you ask, pressing soft kisses to his fingertips as he watches, rapt.

“That’d probably keep me goin’ for the next decade, no help necessary, _Gods_ ,” he says. “Just… hold me.”

“I can do that,” you say, rolling the both of you over, slotting his back to your chest, resting your hand on his hand, the other firmly around his chest. As he finally gets off, you kiss him lazily, close your eyes, and rest.

You’ve almost completely forgotten the dream.

It’s been a long time since you actually drowned, after all. And you have Dirk, now, you _have him_ , and he has you, and that will be okay. You just have to make sure you don’t forget it. It’s easier to forget warmth and safety than frantic blindness, black water in your lungs, fire overhead, no purchase to gain no matter how you thrash, no certainty but death.

You doze off, holding him like a lifeline.

With him in your arms, your lapse back into unconsciousness is dreamless, and you rest like that until Roxy hammers on the door of your quarters.

“C’mon babes, sun’s up, breakfast’s on!”

Dirk groans his objection as you extricate yourself from the bed, wash yourself off, and slip on your last set of Nice Clothes. “See you in a little,” you tell him, ruffling his hair and scooting out to join Roxy and a few early risers in the galley.

She’s pulled out all the stops for the last meal of the voyage - the last of the preserved fruit and the oatmeal, boiled down together, topped off with brown sugar. It’s hot, delicious, an actual familiar dish, and best of all, _not fish_. Sweet fuck, you have eaten enough fish for a lifetime.

“You’re lookin’ perked up,” she comments, hip-checking you gently as she walks by with pots to wash.

“Excited to stand on solid ground is all,” you reply. “And, er, enjoy the fruits of our piracy! Sort of, I guess, so far as any of what we just did was piracy.”

“Aw, we’re gonna make a killin’ off this shit, just you wait. Karkat says you’re with him today, huh? Fuckin’ dream team all up in here, ready to wheel and deal us a wholeass boat fulla gold crowns.”

You chuckle into your oatmeal.

“I certainly hope so.”

When Dirk finally drags himself out of his cabin, looking a little more hungover than he claimed to be while horizontally inclined, you finish your bowl quickly, scrub it out, and fix one for him, delivering a kiss to the top of his head.

“What’s your job during offload?” you ask.

“Everything’s a little fucked up this go-around, but Equius and I are going to be packing the gondolas as Feferi brings them over. She’s got some pretty good connects in the court. Nothing like Karkat, but y’know. No one’s as bizarrely overconnected as Karkat.”

Sollux, who’s been hunched over an uneaten bowl of oatmeal and a chalice of water in the corner since you joined the table, snorts as though at the sheer thought.

“Obviously. He was raised in the court.”

You perk up even further at the tiny piece of new information.

“He was? How does that work?”

“His dad was kind of a big deal in these parts, once upon a time. Came pretty close to taking over after the last guy, got a noose for his troubles. Karkat’s not actually as antisocial as he acts, and he lived off that. Everyone’d liked his dad, too. Whole shitshow two decades back is how Terezi and Vriska got him and half the court with him on their side in the coup.”

“Not true, and fuck you,” Vriska snaps, striding out of her cabin. Her hat is on backwards and her hair is even more disheveled than usual. “Steel and gunpowder and way more fuckin’ pizzazz than the last loser in a crown to act like she knew how the fuck to run shit.”

“That too,” Dirk offers, his tone conciliatory.

Sollux groans exaggeratedly.

“Fuck me for being helpful, I guess.”

“That’s usually the penalty,” Dirk agrees. “Figured you’d have cottoned onto that by now.”

Breakfast more or less completed, you head up to the deck to help Roxy scrub pots, which isn’t bad work at all. She’s determined to have the galley kitchen in order by the time you make shore, and you think that’s quite admirable and also an excellent way to avoid being underfoot as both above and belowdeck begin to churn with activity.

As the towering black mass of the Velvet Court draws nearer on the horizon, it becomes necessary for both you and Roxy to put down the scrub brushes and leave the galley, though it does smell a lot less objectionable than it did when you got started. All hands on deck, including yours. You’ve never been responsible for actually physically assisting with this part, for good reason, but you’re enthusiastic about giving it the ol’ college try.

The Black Diamond II is a touch larger and a great deal heavier than her forebearer, particularly with a hold stuffed with questionably-procured artifacts, and you’re responsible for one of eight lines tossed up by dockworkers, pulling her into position for offload.

As you work, Aradia, handling the sail from mid-deck, leads a song to coordinate the effort. You gather that it’s traditionally a galley song, for the somewhat more backbreaking task of rowing a heavier ship in, but there’s something hauntingly beautiful and universal about it. In time, everyone, including yourself, is joining in with the refrain, and Aradia and Roxy take up the responses.

[[Tune: Ring Down Below]](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ky2r3KEhOvE)

_Pull, pull us home_  
_Oh pull hard, and bring the oars in_

_Pull, pull us home_  
_Oh pull hard, we’ll soon be resting_

_Pull, pull us home_  
_Oh pull hard, there’re better days coming_

_Pull, pull us home_  
_Oh there’s freedom to be had in the cold sea below us_

_Pull, pull us home_  
_Oh pull hard, bring the coastline closer_

_Pull, pull us home_  
_Oh pull hard, there’re better days coming_

_Pull, pull us home_  
_Oh there’s freedom to be had on the edge of a sabre_

_Pull, pull us home_  
_Oh the Dead King knows when your soul meets the shore_

_Pull, pull us home_  
_Oh pull hard, we’ll soon be resting_

_Pull, pull us home_  
_Oh yes a charnel boat’s still a bed of your own_

_Pull, pull us home_  
_Oh pull hard, there’re better days coming_

_Pull, pull us home_  
_Oh there’s freedom to be found in the mouth of a musket_

_Pull, pull us home_  
_Oh Death’s Isle don’t care ‘bout the means that you get there_

_Pull, pull us home_  
_Oh in the court of the Dead King we’ll all be welcomed_

_Pull, pull us home_  
_Oh pull hard, there’ll be peace in the end_

_Pull, pull us home_  
_Oh pull hard, there’re better days coming_

_Pull, pull us home_  
_Oh pull hard, there’re better days coming_

_Pull, pull us home_  
_Oh pull hard, there’re better days coming_

_Pull, pull us home!_

Yeah, it’s a little dark, when you think about it for more than a few seconds, but luckily, you emphatically do not do that.

The Black Diamond II creaks into her moorings for the first time under her newly christened name, and the crew cheers. Aradia leaps down from the mast to high five you as you tie off the line, and you beam as brightly as you think you ever have. There is something really special about all of this, and at moments like this - the sun shining down, warming the deck and your shoulders with it, sore but elated by your role in the successful tie-down - you can maybe see it, a little bit, why Roxy, who is so good at all of these things, would never want there to be a ‘last time’.

Of course, the relief is short-lived, as Karkat immediately assumes authority over the proceedings. Feferi hops to the dock and hurries off with a heavy purse to procure some gondolas, and the far more arduous and far less musical task of unloading the ship begins.

Handcarts from the dockworkers have to be hauled up and hauled back down, the first round of goods has to be moved up from the hold, the second in waiting, all according to fairly precise specifications. The easy sells come first; fine weapons unclaimed by crew members in one gondola, bound for a blacksmith known to accept particularly nice steelwork for resale, boxes of gems loaded into another. These will be trial runs for you, Karkat assures you, since nothing about the value of these items relies on your expertise in their origin stories.

You’re quite fine with that!

Once the first two have been loaded up and he’s instructed the crew on how to prepare the next few, you join him in the gondola and push off down the canal. Karkat poles the craft along, after some presumably good-natured complaining about having to do everything himself.

While you haven’t precisely gotten yourself onto dry land, yet, it’s almost a shock to your system, the varied surroundings, ramshackle buildings, and veritable crowds of people that flank the waterway. Karkat is entirely nonplussed; you doubt you’ll ever not be entranced by this strange way of life.

The itinerary is simple for the first few exchanges that take place. You help empty the gondola, carry whatever needs selling into some dimly lit storefront or drawing room, and Karkat chats with the vendors about mutual friends or some benign aspect of the voyage before beckoning you to present the wares, which you do, with the most dazzling smile you can summon up. Haggling happens, a large bag of gold crowns invariably changes hands, and Karkat ushers you out.

This continues without much exception as the sun rises higher overhead, and the day actually turns rather warm, surprising as that is as the winter approaches. While the bargaining is quite dry and a little difficult to care about, like, at all, you make a study of Karkat’s habits, the little ways he signals his belonging to this place, both unintentionally and to endear himself to the vendors.

He offers a little half-smile and wave to every gondolier you pass, and more than once he slows the boat to speak to someone who flags him down from the shore, welcoming him back or (jokingly, you think?) calling him a rat-faced piece of garbage who they’re absolutely going to destroy at cards at the next possible opportunity. He navigates the incomprehensible network of canals with great skill, though without calling attention to it, and seems to grow a little more comfortable with your presence every time you don’t fuck up a sale. Which is all of them!

Eventually, though, you move on to the first load of trinkets that will almost certainly require you to do something more than look good and lift a few crates, which has Karkat on-edge and you equally so.

“You know this fellow, then?” you ask, for perhaps the fourth time, as he grinds his teeth and poles with exceptional fervor. “And he’s not going to - what do I do if he just entirely rejects the premise, I mean, should we really start with all of this glasswork? That seems like it will require rather a lot of explanation to get even close to what it’s worth, much of this is priceless -”

“Fuck’s sake, English, I know what I’m doing,” he growls. “This’ll be the easiest one of the day. The guy we’re selling to is basically my - like, my shitty uncle, sort of. Can’t stress the ‘shitty’ part enough, but he’s a good guy. I will skin you if you tell him I said that, to be clear.”

“Is he…” you pause, blanching at the description. “Nice?”

“No, absolutely not. You’re going to hate Mituna, but that’s pretty much par for the course,” Karkat warns you as he ties your gondola down. “And don’t worry. He’ll definitely reciprocate. Fucker’s half blind, old as shit, mostly toothless, generally about as fucked up as a person can survive _being_ , in basically every respect, but his appraisals are quality, and he’s got buyers everywhere. We’ll get a fair price out of him, too, even for the nicer shit. Just don’t talk _too_ much. This is definitely a stop where you’re going to want to shut the fuck up and pay attention till you get your training wheels off.”

You pointedly don’t remind him that this is how he has described _all_ of the stops, at least initially.

Thus far, your favorite has been an older woman with a mane of dark hair, missing the better part of her jaw and a sizable portion of her temple, who signed excitedly to him on your arrival with a gondola of cut and uncut gems. She looked you up and down perfunctorily, and Karkat wound up translating through an introduction. She’s his godmother, through some circuitous parafamilial nonsense, and she wanted to know why he hadn’t brought Feferi or Aradia along, as is his usual practice.

When he signed back, he tended to mouth and enunciate the words under his breath, which helped to figure out what was going on. You gathered the little factoid about his traditional fencing team-ups less because he translated directly and more because, after she signed something with a concerned expression, he pantomimed horror, turned to you, and whisper-signed in your general direction, cheating so she could follow, “fuck, Aradia, you didn’t tell me you were into himbofication!”

You smiled good-naturedly through the exchange, helped cart in the cases of meticulously labelled gems, stood behind Karkat for half an hour as he ran through the stock and argued over pricing, and that was that.

This will be, as they say, a ‘level up’ in difficulty, starting as you carefully unload a beautiful chandelier and a broad selection of chalices and goblets much finer than those the crew has been using in the galley. Luckily, the cobblestone sidewalk in this part of the court is wide enough to allow pedestrians to pass as you work, and Karkat helps you with the most delicate bits.

He guards what you can’t carry as you step inside the storefront, blinking in the sudden darkness.

“Hello, there, Mr. Mituna?” you call, setting down the first load of goods.

No immediate response. You pause, inhaling carefully. It smells a bit more _off_ than even the rest of the Velvet Court, which is filthy beyond reckoning, and you can’t quite put your finger on why. Black flies buzz in the back of the room, and you wrinkle your nose even further.

Returning to the walkway, you take the next few crates in without thinking about it too hard.

“How’s it look in there? Fuck, I paid some kid a few pennies to run by, if he’s not up and ready for us...” Karkat grumbles, trailing off at your confused expression. “He’s _not_?”

“Haven’t seen him yet, and before you ask, I did give him a shout!”

“Motherfucker,” Karkat groans. “He’s been on a bender again, bastard said he was getting off the sauce, never fuckin’ does.”

You shrug, taking the last crate in hand, and follow him in.

“Mituna, you old worm-panned piece of shit,” he calls as he opens the door, “where the fuck are you? Thought I was pretty clear about having some exotic-ass shit for you today, don’t fucking flake on me now, I’m about to make us both rich.”

His face changes as you enter. You know he can hear the flies, smell the - whatever.

“Mituna?”

“He’s stepped out for a sec’,” a nasal voice replies, and a backroom door closes as a tall young man strides up to meet you. “I’ll be takin’ care of the business you got with him.”

The stranger is dressed in a black leather coat, which brushes his hips, over an immaculate white button-down. His dark hair is slicked back, and he’s smiling around a cigarette, lips closed, the expression not reaching his eyes. As you watch, he bums it on the wall and tosses the roll of paper onto the floorboards.

If you had to hazard a guess, this is not Mituna.

Karkat bristles like a dog backed into a corner, his hand already on the hilt of one of his knives.

“Who the fuck are you?” he demands, which actually tells you a lot about the situation, because Karkat knows _everybody_. You, sensing that this situation may have just gone rather a bit belly-up, begin edging towards the door.

“Just an investor. Heard a ship came in with some Aetrian cargo, wanted first dibs. You got a problem with that?”

“You’re motherfucking right, I’ve got a problem! This isn’t your shop, jackass, if Mituna’s ‘stepped out for a sec’, turn your scrawny ass around and fetch him back!”

The man’s gaze flickers down to the crates you’ve already brought in.

“I’ll be taking those,” he says. “And the list of vendors you’ve already sold to today.”

“The only thing you’ll be taking is my knife in your smug face if you don’t tell me what the fuck is going on, right now.”

You take another small step towards the door, and suddenly the man is paying attention to _you_ which is very much the opposite of what you were going for.

“Those are some nice rings you got there,” he notes.

And then he pulls out a really, really big gun.

“Take ‘em off,” he directs you. “Or your bigmouthed friend gets to figure out how to shittalk me without a face.”

“Son of a -” Karkat starts, as you scramble to do exactly that - oh, fuck this, fuck all of this, you want to be back on the ship _right fucking now_ , you do not even slightly endorse any of this ‘shouting at the clearly murder-inclinded fellow who’s probably got a whole lot of guns and knives and who knows what else tucked in that big coat’ strategy, you are getting out of this alive, thank you very much.

But that may not be in the cards, because Karkat has drawn his set of kukris and is taking advantage of the stature differential at work to lunge under the trajectory of the rifle, presumably thinking to hack the guy to pieces, which, well, great! That sounds like a great idea! You plaster yourself against the wall, thinking to get the hell out of the way, as the first shot shatters the shop window and the intruder brings the barrel down against Karkat’s temple, tossing it aside and drawing a sword of his own.

He parries the first downward strike with both of his blades at once, but you can’t see this ending well. By the looks of it, this stranger knows how to handle the cutlass he’s wielding, raining strikes down on Karkat, keeping him wholly on the defensive. He successfully knocks one kukri from his grip with the flat of his blade, grasping him by the other wrist and twisting it behind his back in a single, fluid gesture.

“The list,” he says smoothly. “Of other buyers to visit.”

“Go to hell!” Karkat spits.

He kicks one of his kukris over, spinning across the wood flooring, coming to a rest near your feet. You pick it up impulsively, your grip shaking too profoundly to even think of doing anything with it, until it clatters to the floor. Oh fuck. Now the man with a sword at your crewmate’s neck is looking at you with an expectant grin, and he surely sees the way your hands are trembling.

Karkat looks as though he has just come to terms with his death.

You wonder if he is regretting not having Aradia or Feferi with him now, because dazed and thoroughly in the grip of a much larger man, you don’t think he is going to have much of a shot, here, unless someone does something.

(You are someone.)

(Fuck.)

“Hey!” you call. “Unhand him, sir!”

That sounds pretty good, you suppose. Your voice barely shook at all. You are going to die either way, but you are going to go out with a brave one liner.

Oh Gods, if only Dirk was here.

The man looks up to face you, stepping forward, not relaxing his grip on Karkat even for a second. He’s still got his sword hand free.

“What are you planning on doing about it, sweetheart?” he asks.

You search the room wildly for something to use, settle on the box containing the chandelier, and pick it up.

“I’ll throw it all in the canal,” you say, as threateningly as possible, backing towards the door.

“Sounds like a losing proposition for both of us,” he says, his voice turned low with menace. “Because then I’ll cut your little friend’s throat, and toss him in right after.”

You back out the door, hoping against hope that he actually does want these goods intact, that they might be worth Karkat’s life, or at least might buy you a little time to get the fuck out of here.

The sunlight is near-blinding, and the cobblestones make it almost impossible to walk without looking over your shoulder, but you squint and watch him anyway, moving slowly towards the canal.

“This alone is worth a fortune,” you tell him. “Enough to live well on for the rest of your miserable life, sold to the right buyer.”

“Hey, I’m already interested,” the man chuckles. “Put it down, drop a few a those rings, you’re free to go. I’ll even let you keep that face fulla gold.”

You hold the crate out, suspending it over the dark water of the canal.

“I’ll drop it if you don’t release him. You’ll have to stop me at this point, I’m feeling a bit weak in the knees at the prospect of his death, and I don’t know how much longer I can hold all these _jewels_ -”

“I will gut him like a fucking fish!”

“Then you’ll do so without the damned trinkets you consider worth killing for!”

He’s laser-focused on the crate, now, teeth bared, and he raises his sword, slightly, and you think you’ve made a terrible mistake, that Karkat is about to die for your total lack of ability, of course, you should have run, he might have been able to talk his way free if you hadn’t made him _angry_...

As you watch, in abject horror, he digs his blade into the taut brown skin of Karkat’s neck.

And then, something strange happens.

A bag of bread goes flying over your shoulder, landing in the canal, though it doesn’t make a splash as it ought to.

A massive sword seems to sprout from the attacker’s shoulder with bone-splintering force, releasing a gout of blood, its trajectory continuing well past his sternum, nearabouts splitting him in half.

Karkat wriggles free of his now-limp grasp with a noise between relief and disgust, drenched in viscera, bleeding only slightly from the shallow cut to the side of his neck, as the man goes limp and falls to the paving stones, his face a mask of surprise that crumples in death.

Behind him, a strikingly beautiful woman in a fine jade-green gown and a matching headscarf shot with gold embroidery stands, looking utterly furious.

“Are you alright?” she demands, pressing Karkat into her arms, ignoring the blood seeping into her dress.

You turn and set the crate down, breathing heavily, and then sit on it, not trusting yourself to keep standing up in the aftermath of all that.

“M’fine,” he grumbles.

“Was he alone? Are there others?”

“Don’t think so. Fucker killed Mituna, though.”

“Oh, dear. I’m sorry to hear that,” she says, though she visibly regains her composure at the realization that no further threat is forthcoming.

Karkat squirms out of her protective embrace, complaining under his breath - you catch him insisting that he was fine, and had the entire situation under control, which seems false.

“I’ll call in for someone to deal with the body,” he says gruffly, then turns to you. “Nice thinking, English. Really pulled that out of your ass.”

He flags down a passing gondola, one hand to the bloody wound on the side of his neck, and hops in. Because it’s the Velvet Court, and probably also because it’s Karkat, the woman poling the craft doesn’t stop to ask questions.

The woman is frowning down at the discarded paper bag of bread in the canal, and you stand shakily to join her, thinking perhaps some of it might be salvaged. When you look, though, the heavy bag is floating, somehow, just barely touching the surface of the water, which seems wildly physically improbable.

She doesn’t look up at your approach, instead kneeling over the precipice with great focus.

“Dear,” she says softly. “I would like my bread back, please. That was rather expensive.”

The sea itself seems to swell, as though in the opposite of a whirlpool, and a small wave crests, bearing the bag up to the sea wall, directly into her waiting hands.

“Thank you,” she adds, then straightens and stands to face you.

“You’re Kanaya Maryam!” you exclaim.

“That is correct. And you would be?” she says, raising her already delicately arched eyebrows.

“Jake English,” you say, bowing formally. The way people bow outside of Aetria is slightly different than what you’re accustomed to; in practice, your attempt to learn the gesture is still recognizably foreign, too much of a flourish to it, but the muscle memory is a challenging foe indeed.

“We’ve met before, but not by name,” Kanaya replies, frowning and wiping delicately at one of the more bruised-looking baguettes with the long sleeve of her gown, choosing a section of the rich green fabric that is not soaked with blood. She pauses midway through the task to look you up and down, lingering at your wrists. You fight the impulse to shove them behind your back and broaden your smile as distractingly as possible. “No longer bound, I see.”

“Oh!” You cough conspicuously. “That was, er, rather a misunderstanding on the part of all involved, I think.”

“Nonetheless. I tend to pay attention when young people are hauled into my establishment in bondage. I typically find this to be good practice.” She sighs. “It is not an entirely uncommon occurrence, but you are a memorable guest, I’m afraid.”

Well, that’s a brilliant first impression you’ve apparently made.

“If not as a prisoner, then, what brings you back to the Velvet Court?”

“Uh, piracy?” you say, wincing at the question in your tone. “I, er, haven’t strictly committed too much of it yet, but I am really looking forward to the opportunity.”

“Off to an auspicious start,” she observes, canting her head to indicate the corpse that rests more or less at your feet. “In the future, it typically helps one’s credibility, when negotiating such a standoff, to possess a weapon of one’s own, and to point it threateningly at something important. This is rudimentary piracy. Please hold my bread for a moment.”

Agreeably, you accept the hefty bag - good lord, but the bread does smell awfully good, despite its narrow brush with the murky waters of the canal - and she retrieves her shamshir from the dead man’s chest, resting a suede boot on the back of his torn-open, unconventionally leather longcoat, leveraging the blade free with a sound like a melon splitting open. Flicking excess blood from the long, curved scimitar, she proceeds to wipe it dry on the corpse’s pants with a noise of disgust.

You expect her to retrieve her baked goods and resume either waiting around for Karkat or make her way off to Starlight’s End, which is probably where you’re going next once this is all done with anyway, but she kneels beside the body and flips it over by the un-splintered shoulder, inspecting the bloodied face, feeling around the slender fellow’s torso with some kind of clear intentionality evidenced by her concentrated expression.

As you watch, curiously, she pulls a small golden amulet from around the man’s neck, inspects it closely, and tears it, in a short jerk, from the cadaver, replacing the bloodstained collar of his shirt after tucking it into a pouch on her belt.

“Would you, er, like the body brought with? I know Karkat’s off fetching… whatever sort of corpse removal services you’ve got here, and don’t get me wrong, I’m awfully curious about that process, but I’m very much obliged to you for your help, and if you’d like, I could carry him just as easily as the bread, I quite think,” you offer. “Not a very hefty fellow, is he. ‘F you’ve got something you’d like done with it, too, I’m rather an expert on such matters. And hardly in a position to ask questions, either!”

You make a conscious effort not to look _too_ enthusiastic about the prospect, furrowing your brow as though with profound and clinical interest. That is some wound she inflicted, isn’t it. You can practically see inside the man’s chest, split open from collarbone to sternum as he is.

She glances up at you thoughtfully, the corner of her meticulously painted lips twisting upward.

“You’re very kind to offer. But I’ve everything I need, and there’s no need to soil either of our hands any further on his account. An Ampora, unless he’s recently robbed one. Truly, you’re not beholden to me for anything. I do _so_ enjoy killing these pitiable excuses for men. You have made my afternoon, and quite possibly my week.”

“Excellent!” you say, smiling openly. To be frank, you don’t see anything special about the man, in death. He’s got familiarly high cheekbones, full lips slick with blood - you wonder if you know him, or, well, ‘Ampora’ certainly rings a bell, though you’ve met an awful lot of horrible people, in the past few months, and can’t call whichever one she might be referring to immediately to mind.

His coat, you notice, now, despite being crafted of leather, is lined with a rich purple brocade, shot with gold to match the pendant. His teeth, visible beneath the fast-drying blood, are a bit too nice for a career pirate. Almost eerily white and perfect.

“You’re in good company with Karkat,” she adds, “but do be more careful in the future. There is something brewing in the Velvet Court, and this won’t be the end of it.”

“Wait, do you - do you know something, about… what he might have been doing here?”

“Nothing good. Now, if you’ll excuse me,” she says, stepping back, turning to you and extending her arms expectantly for the paper bag of assorted breads.

You return it to her, questions bubbling in your chest, so many all at once that you can hardly give voice to any.

“It’s a pleasure to meet you properly, Jake English,” she adds. “I hope that we may encounter each other under better circumstances, in the future. And congratulations on your freedom. I’ll be seeing you around.”

She flags a passing gondola and hops lightly down into the boat, her various loaves of bread, precariously balanced though they are, remaining in impeccable order.

Alright, perhaps you voiced your aspersions about the profession of the Sea King’s chosen too soon. Innkeeper or not, you’re hard-pressed not to be just a tad bit overcome with admiration based on, well, that entire interaction. You sit beside the body to wait for Karkat to return, considering the force necessary to split and splinter through half a man’s ribcage with a sword like that one. You think it would probably be quite justifiable to fall head over tentacles in love with someone over that level of forearm strength alone, nevermind if they spent most of their time washing out flagons and whatever the fuck an innkeeper did.

‘Inns’ are a bit of a foreign concept to you, like many other things. You gather, from context and experience, that there are beds and fights there in addition to the food and drink. Norms surrounding use of space were somewhat different in Aetria.

So were a lot of things, though. You’re expecting some sort of, well, magistrate, an investigative officer, maybe, but when Karkat returns in a whitewashed gondola you’ve never seen before, after a few minutes pass and the corpse is starting to cool, it’s in the company of two casually-dressed women who could easily be sisters, one of whom immediately exits the craft as the other moors the boat.

“Untouched?” she asks you, and you nod. “Any known relatives?”

“An Ampora, I believe,” you say, attempting to infuse your tone with substantially more certainty than you actually possess.

She nods, her eerie set of reddish-brown eyes flickering down to the dead man in his congealing pool of blood, which probably means you said the right thing.

“He had some kind of necklace thingy,” you add helpfully.

The second woman exits the boat, climbing up to join the first as she draws a thin blade, so quickly as to be almost a blur of steel, and slices open the corpse’s shirt, revealing that the man was wearing a great deal more gold than just the singular pendant. The effect, you think, is rather stylish, though the women set about divesting him of his flashy accessories, including a previously-hidden pair of heavy gold bangles.

“We will take our fee from the body,” she tells Karkat, looking up as though she’s forgotten that the two of you are there, then turns to her partner. “We’ll return shortly for the other in the shop once we’ve stripped this one.”

She adds some comment in a language that reminds you of what little you’ve heard of Dirk’s native tongue, and her counterpart laughs harshly. As you watch, wide-eyed, they hoist the cadaver into the gondola, return to nod cordially to Karkat, and take off without another word. All that remains of the events of the past half-hour is a massive bloodstain seeping into the cobblestones of the sidewalk.

It doesn’t really look that different from the rest of the filthy walkways already. Will probably be indiscernible after the next light rainfall.

“Well, that was fucked up,” Karkat notes, emerging from the shop with his kukris in his belt, a bandage, now, tied around his neck. “Hope you enjoyed the break, English, ‘cause we’ve got more shit to move.”

“Really? After all that?” you ask, more perplexed than offended at the prospect. “He seemed - am I incorrect in saying that he seemed to have anticipated us, somehow? That there seemed to be some other - something at work, there?”

“Look,” Karkat says, putting an awkward hand on your forearm. “This is your first time out here, I get it. You don’t know the ins and outs of this rancid hellhole yet, and let me be clear, I love this rancid hellhole, but that’s exactly what it is. Shit like this isn’t exactly beyond the pale. It’s something to get used to, if you’re really going to stick with this lifestyle.”

“I just - it doesn’t really make sense, does it? How he seemed to have heard news of our arrival, and to attribute value to Aetrian goods? I’ve never seen that man before in my life, I can’t say at all if he’s an Ampora or whatever the hell, but he’s almost certainly not of Aetrian descent.”

“News travels fast,” he suggests, rifling around at his belt, producing a long, sheathed knife and offering it to you. “Here. There’s literally no way arming you is a good idea, but it’s probably a worse idea to have you walking around without one. Fuck. Five quid, Strider tries to kill me over this. As though it’s my goddamn fault for walking around with a disaster magnet!”

“I don’t, er, exactly know what to do with this,” you admit, taking the knife gingerly.

Of course you’ve handled weapons, you’re even modestly capable with a sword, as much as childhood practice matches with other highborn children qualify as grounding for familiarity and competence. You were hardly the worst at it, but very much not the best, either, and it was a very long time ago. The memory is tinged with the failures of it, which outnumbered your successes rather significantly. From the beginning, Jane’s instincts with blades were much better. You hesitated. Never wanted to hurt anyone, really. Not back then, at least. But one couldn’t afford to hesitate with mother’s approval on the line.

Or, in this case, Karkat’s life, dash it all.

You just notably failed to do almost anything about a very real threat to your very real quasi-friend. So piracy, as a personal philosophy, has done nothing to cure you of your reservations about - no, you’ve totally killed people. Well. You’ve knowingly… assisted, in the deaths of people, rather. Never stuck the knife in yourself. Always had to be so damned circuitous about it. Always kept yourself one step removed.

It twists at your gut. You thought, surely, that when the time came, you’d - you’d just _get it_ , intuitively. In hindsight, couldn’t you have picked up the discarded kukri, wasn’t the man thoroughly distracted by Karkat, wasn’t there an option that wouldn’t have nearly ended in his death? Couldn’t you have killed him? You have little enough to like about most people. You _know people_ too well for that, and this man made it quite clear who he was and what he intended to do.

What stopped you from intervening before it was nearly too late was no more than simple cowardice. You thought you might be able to live, if you supplicated adequately.

A dedicated hip-knife won’t do a damned thing to change that essential fact of you, now, will it. If you couldn’t do it then - and you can’t do it now…

“Hey, don’t go all weird and starey on me,” Karkat protests. “Get in the fucking boat, I swear to fuck. Everybody’s traumatized, bitch, let’s get you some gold shit.”

You follow him back into the gondola agreeably, feeling only marginally tethered to your body. As you return to the ship for a fresh cargo - fittingly, a great deal of _gold shit_ , less finely wrought, not jewelry quality, bound for a metalworker Karkat knows to pay handsomely for raw materials - you watch the dark water, near-opaque beneath the hull of the boat, ripple past inscrutably, work at pulling yourself back together.

Karkat is quickly distracted from the earlier events of the afternoon once, after delivering the frankly massive amount of scrap gold to the metalworker, you branch out to other purveyors with more intricate artifacts, only to be encounter an increasingly familiar story. The Aetrian artifacts are met with barely-veiled immensity of interest. Karkat’s estimates of the prices they would fetch prove, ultimately, inadequate for several merchants’ _starting offers_. It’s curious, is what it is. You hadn’t expected to be called on to authenticate - honestly, you hadn’t expected to do anything but watch Karkat haggle and try to keep your attention from wandering away from the process - but you wind up writing out certificates and explanations for a few goods, including the gilt mahogany lampstand and a few particularly overwrought gold-coated skulls that Aradia presumably could not resist, though they’re not your work.

Clearly not your work. Your style leans ostentatious, of course, you’d never deny that, but you wonder if this artist ever met a strip of gold leaf they didn’t like. There _is_ such a thing as excess!

No one seems especially eager to disclose the reason for their enthusiasm, but an older fellow, a cheerful man in a vest decorated with shards of bone, in the process of inspecting one of the fine-wrought collar buckles, quite accidentally makes a useful disclosure.

“This is of noteworthy cultural significance, right?” he presses, as you’re pointing out the impossibly delicate filigree work, a scene that depicts a prostrate young man before a snake deity from the pre-modern religious tradition, which still figures heavily in most classically inspired artwork. “The buckle itself, I mean, not just the engravings. You don’t have the specs for the collar it would accompany, by any chance, do you?”

“I might be able to roughly draw some up?” you offer. “This would have belonged to an especially well-regarded member of the _caro supellecta_ , someone really beloved by their patron household. At this stage, the typically leather band would traditionally be replaced with silk in the steward family’s colors.”

“No, that’s perfect,” the merchant says, lifting up the heavy buckle experimentally. “Little tidbits like that - that’s exactly what buyers are looking for. Intimate connection, I mean, insight. I don’t suppose you’d mind writing that down for me, would you?”

You wouldn’t mind a bit, really, but you feel your brows knit together when he hands you a quill and ink nonetheless.

Karkat, who has been catching on to the dynamics at work fairly quickly, demands twice as much for the authenticated artifact, and looks moderately surprised when he receives it with minimal back-and-forth. This wasn’t supposed to be one of the vendors he had a real rapport with, after all.

“Vriska’s going to lose her shit once she gets back from playing pattycake with Terezi,” Karkat notes triumphantly, handing you the sack of crowns and gesturing that you should feel the heft of it, which you do. “We’re making a fucking fortune out here.”

“Do you think Janey left her guard around, or something? Set up a local outpost? I just don’t see any reason that these utter randos should… well, should know any of this,” you say, feeling the leather pouch, noting that it is, indeed, prodigiously full. “I’m not complaining, mind you, just… awfully curious what it is about Aetrian culture that’s so universally intriguing to these ruffians.”

He shrugs, taking back the weighty purse.

“I’m going to take that question seriously, so don’t make me regret it, okay? Most of the vendors we sell to are merchants - they pay better than the people who’re just hoarding shiny shit up in the Court like addlebrained magpies, cough-Terezi-cough. So if we get a good price off someone, especially an _unusually_ good price, that doesn’t necessarily mean they’re personally drooling over a fucked-up relic of particularly deep-in-denial-about-being-slavery enslavement. Just means they think it’ll fetch a premium on the mainland. So it might not be Shittybonevest McWhoeverthefuck who’s got a raging hardon for Aetrian culture. He might just know he’s got a downstream buyer or five who does.”

“Oh,” you say, in lieu of responding individually to any of those statements. “I suppose… it’s possible that she’s made more ground than we might have anticipated. She did have ideas, I know, about cultural diplomacy, once the boundary came down. Or… there are a number of perfectly reasonable explanations, aren’t there?”

“We’ll find out eventually if we stick around here long enough,” Karkat snorts. “No one in this heinous shitheap can keep their disease-ridden wordspout shut for long.”

The feeling of profound unease doesn’t precisely diminish, but that gives you some more to think about as Karkat returns to poling the gondola along in relative silence. You don’t really have any opinions on what Jane may or may not be doing, so long as she’s not murdering Dirk, or anyone it would upset Dirk to have murdered, such as Karkat. Oh, dear. He would have been so upset.

But also… Roxy. Or, maybe Aradia, too, actually. A little bit?

Your chest pinches at the thought.

All you know is that she’s got designs on Vriska, whatever those designs may be. Ugh, you know exactly what those designs are, the _caro supellecta_ pledged to the royal household are irredeemable gossips - not as though there’s anything else to do, most of the time - and you’ve heard more than you’d really like to know about your sister’s predilections.

You also know she’s got designs on exceeding your mother, as a conqueror and as a ruler. And she’ll be quite good at it, too, _even_ if not _especially_ without your help. It’s disconcerting, though, that she’s moved so fast, somehow.

Dirk doesn’t seem too worried about the impending Aetrian invasions, though. You have been endeavoring not to be worried, either, for months, now. Pirates are more than okay with a little political turmoil in the service of improved pirating prospects. As a treat.

(Pirates are also okay with murdering people who’ve got a cutlass to the throat of a crewmate, though.)

(Just as a reminder, a little note to self, they are definitely supposed to be okay with that. Brave enough to intervene directly when the opportunity presents itself.)

You don’t entirely empty out the hold, in the end. The last few gondolas take what remains of the goods to Starlight’s End, where they can be stored in the attic, for a fee. You’re grateful for that; Karkat is ebullient over what you’ve already managed to make in a day’s work, and you are fucking exhausted in absolutely every respect.

The solid grey stone of the canal-level entrance of the tavern has never looked so inviting. The smell of not-blood and not-sea-scum and not-decaying-flesh has never been such a relief.

Feferi helps you out of the gondola with a pat on the back, her grin wider and more excited than you've ever seen it. It's a night for celebration, the aftermath of a wildly propitious offload, state of Karkat's neck and your nerves notwithstanding, and you can already hear the strains of music filtering from inside.

You're ready for this to get easier. You're ready for _something_ to go right.

You absolutely need to find Dirk, right now.


	5. Unnamed Uprising (or, alas, poor honeymoon phase)

In the evenings, after a long day beneath the broiling intensity of the sun, fog hangs heavy over the Velvet Court. The temperature has dropped more rapidly than you thought possible, but you don’t realize just how cold you’ve been, poling through the canals with Karkat in the waning dusk, until you step inside _Starlight’s End_.

Rather suddenly, you are awash in warmth of all kinds. Lights flicker in settings built into the honey-toned wood panelling, the smell of toasting bread and hot stew permeates the air, tables full of jostling bodies ring with laughter, conversation, and song. It’s a peculiar thing to walk in on, feeling as strange and distant from everything as you currently do. You’re the only one in here trapped inside your head, and you wish that wasn’t the case, because yowza, everyone else does seem to be having a hell of a lot of fun.

As you and Karkat close the door behind you, shutting out the chill, a cheer goes up from a massive central table, spreading throughout the tavern with only a slight pause. A few members of the Black Diamond’s crew have made it in, and by the looks of things, they’ve been settled here for a while.

“There’re the men of the hour!” Roxy calls, standing on her chair to flag you down. “Get your sweet asses over here, we’re gonna toast a few _billion_ times, we’re fuckin’ rich!”

You chuckle agreeably, wending your way through the crowd as Karkat follows, already back to scowling defensively at the return to the welcoming arms of the people he presumable loves more than anyone in the world. After a day in his company, you can certainly say that you understand him _better_ , but you can’t say you understand him.

Roxy nearabouts tackles you as you join the table, quickly joined by Aradia as you slide onto the bench, sandwiched between them. A great relief, you think, then remember your terror and virtual uselessness when Karkat had a cutlass at his throat, and decide that it is not such a great relief, after all. Either of them could certainly hold their own in combat, but then again, so, theoretically, could Karkat. It is such a strange liability, caring about the integrity of other people’s necks.

But Roxy leans against your shoulder, and you’re immeasurably grateful for the physicality of it, which helps you summon up a shaky grin.

“So?” she prompts, elbowing you and kicking Karkat under the table. “Tell us everything! How the everloving _fuck_ did you absolute legends pull this one off?”

“Mituna’s dead,” Karkat replies. “Drinking for him tonight.”

She frowns, but rolls with the revelation easily. “Shit, let’t get a round out here in his honor! For everybody in the tavern! Sorry to hear it, babe, I know he was - I know he was important to you.”

He nods shortly, staring down at a bowl of unshelled peanuts with a palpable sense of gloom that you hadn’t picked up on, throughout the day. Perhaps you have something beyond barter mechanics to learn from Karkat. Across the table, Sollux puts an arm over his shoulders, perhaps the single most uncomfortable gesture of sympathy you’ve ever witnessed, and also the first time you’ve seen him touch someone on purpose. He leans in to say something quietly to Karkat, but you can’t hear exactly what over the rising din in the tavern as Roxy, commissioning Feferi, Nepeta, and Equius for help, begins to distribute pints of ale to the entire room.

You glance around nervously, trying to find Dirk, drawing a blank, though you do squint at a particularly burly bleach-blond pirate long enough to concern him before realizing that his bare shoulders are entirely devoid of tattoos.

“Are you alright?” Aradia asks, nudging you gently in the ribs.

“Oh, fit as a fiddle and healthy as a horse!” you reply, which makes her snort with laughter. She is, perhaps clearly, a little tipsy already. “How long have the lot of you been sitting around?”

“Only since we got the last few gondolas loaded up,” she says. “Dirk is out with Vriska. I think the gold was burning a hole in their pockets.”

“Already?” you laugh. “My heavens. Those are some flippin’ jerry-built pockets they’ve got, then. Do hope they’re investing in some with greater structural integrity.”

She laughs again, which makes you feel buoyant with… something, some kind of something, and helps to relax your shoulders slightly. According to Aradia, the rest of the crew enjoyed a spectacularly uneventful day, save for some excitement when a pair of sea lions attempted to board the ship, and, finding that impossible, blocked the pier until they could be lured away by the remnants of fish carcasses that Roxy was in the process of cleaning from the galley.

You haven’t seen a sea lion yet, and wish you had been there for that. Roxy, returning with a pint for you and one for Aradia, assures you that you don’t.

“They’re brutal! We got a big old fucker aboard our ship when we were pulling in the codend this one time - fuck, I musta been like, eight - and it took one lady’s arm right off her shoulder and smacked the ship dog into the railing near hard enough to kill the little guy.”

“Cripes, that doesn’t sound especially friendly of it.”

“Nah, they’re cute and all, but if any animal’s capable of like… actively malicious intent, I swear to fuck, it’s the bigass sea lions we get this far north.”

“Whales!” Aradia cuts in.

“ _Whales_?” you ask, aghast. “But aren’t they… gentle giants? Vegetarians of the seas?”

“Oh, lemme tell you a story about motherfuckin’ cachalots,” Roxy begins, and you lean in with a smile and clink glasses with Aradia as she begins to spin a somewhat difficult to believe tale of seven sperm whales that once followed a fishing vessel for a full week, stripping the catch from every line they pulled up. “One line - four thousand hooks! - in _four thousand hooks_ , dude, we got _one halibut_ and _one fuckin’ rock_. A rock! A halibut, and a rock! It would have been one thing if it was just the halibut, but leavin’ the rock - that was when I knew they were fuckin’ with us. Whales are sentient, _and_ they’re capable of evil, and you can’t convince me otherwise. I’ve seen it in person, swear it on every single one of the Sea King’s teeth.”

As Aradia begins to reply with a gleam to her eye that suggests her follow-up story will almost certainly concern a _dead_ whale, Feferi, Nepeta, and Equius crowd back up to the table, and Roxy looks up with a start. “Hey, are we ready?” she asks.

Karkat nods tersely, and stands, lifting up his still-full tankard.

“Everybody shut the fuck up!” he hollers, with a volume that still manages to impress you, after all these months. “We’re toasting to Mituna, the ugliest motherfucker ever to walk through the court. He was a shit person, but a great pirate and a loyal friend, if you could understand a word he fuckin’ said. He was a fixture of this festering dungpile, and we’re worse off without him. Raise your glass, and say something wildly inappropriate for no discernable reason. S’what he would have wanted. For Mituna!”

“For Mituna!”

The cheer passes through the tavern, aided unquestionably by the drunkenness of most everyone involved, and you willingly join in, though you mime your corresponding sip from your flagon. No one really cares, which is cool.

Roxy nudges you with an elbow as the response to Karkat’s toast dies back into the general sounds of life and merriment in the tavern.

“Didja know the dead guy you met today figures big in a classic song? S’actually why we call it the Unnamed Uprising, on account of him not spilling the deets when they tortured the shit outta him. Never caught anyone involved but the dude that instigated it. Mituna was actually metal as fuck.”

“Really?”

She leans slightly over you, making eye contact with Aradia, who grins in response, only to break into a duet that starts slow, picking up emphatically at the chorus.

[[Tune: Off to Sea Once More]](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YBxGLCJzg_s)

_From the day that she rose, Gods only know, the throne was soaked in gore_  
_Queen Meenah’s games, as many proclaimed, were a route to un-civil war_  
_Then a challenger tried to oppose her crimes and rallied vast support_  
_But he’s dead with no thanks and his body hangs from the arch to the Velvet Court_

_The Court, the Court, he fought for the Velvet Court_  
_But he’s dead with no thanks and his body hangs from the arch to the Velvet Court_

“Can you sociopathic shitheels maybe not sing a depressing-ass song about my dad getting his ass royally handed to him when I’m already kind of having a shitty day?” Karkat interrupts. “Seriously, I know any sort of judiciousness is a lot to expect from you literal, _actual_ bastards, but that’s kind of fucked up, even for us.”

“Aw, sorry Karkles!” Roxy calls across the table, then turns to you. “Fine, so the gist of it is, the last Queen was kind of, uh, terrible?”

“Most of us didn’t actually live under her rule, but a few did,” Aradia adds. “She levied a massively unpopular tax on entry and exit of the port as a fee for the protection of any ship that came to harbor. Claimed twenty percent of any spoils brought in for sale in the court; in practice, most contend that it was a great deal higher. Captains who objected, of which there were many, were gutted and ‘fed to the fish’. Rafts of bodies rotted in the bay. Most native chordate fish are not known for their expedient consumption of human flesh. I could have told her that.”

“Buuuut you would have gotten murdered too,” Roxy says, snorting into her drink, which seems to be a glass of water.

You’ve never actually seen Roxy drink - she puts on a good show of it, when the rest of the crew is indulging, but conspicuously does not actually partake. Well, conspicuously to you, since you’ve been paying more attention to her habits, lately. You’d supposed that her role as cook prohibited her from engaging in the same periodic debauchery as other crewmates, but the fact that the pattern continues on land is interesting, to say the least, and somewhat debunks that theory.

“So, a bunch of locals banded up with some of the captains and their crews to try to put her down before she tore the Velvet Court apart. The problem being she’d already replaced the ones she’d murdered with people on her own payroll, and killing the shit out of anyone who opposes you turns out to pay really well. Karkat’s dad, his kinda ambiguous life partner Mituna, and a few others started trying to organize a resistance movement. It kind of got quashed before it got off the ground, but the story there is that after they hung him, they were still hunting for the rest of the people who’d been involved. Mituna had all his teeth pulled out, tortured within an inch of his life, but still wouldn’t give up the other members of the resistance. ‘Unnamed Uprising’. Ultimately just got attributed to the one guy they hung over it, even though it was basically half the Court involved. From what I gather, Mituna was never really the same after that, what with all the torturing and also, y’know, his live-in-BF was hella dead. Not sure why they didn’t kill him too in the end, but he hung around after for… musta been like two decades, right?”

“He was very old,” Aradia notes, then visibly brightens up. “Did you see the body?”

“Afraid not,” you say, swallowing the lump in your throat.

Blessedly, Kanaya materializes before either of them can enquire further, changed into a fresh dress, a simple sleeveless red velvet number partially obscured by a half-apron, and bearing several bowls of stew, slices of crusty bread balanced precariously on the rim of the vessels.

“Are you discussing the events of this afternoon?” she asks, setting a bowl in front of you.

“Just havin’ a little impromptu in-memoriam for the ol’ fucker,” Roxy says, grinning up at her. “Gods, it’s always so good to see you. Only thing that never changes about the court!”

“Mituna was a good man, regardless of his endeavors not to be,” Kanaya notes, producing a handful of spoons from a pocket of her apron and distributing them around the table. “Karkat is correct in noting that we are worse off for his loss.”

Roxy tips her empty glass in agreement, and Kanaya plucks it from her hand for a refill as she sweeps back to the bar. Aradia leans against you somewhat insistently as you begin to eat.

“Have you spoken to her yet?”

“Briefly,” you say, spoon partway to your lips - you’re only just realizing how ravenously hungry you are.

“Once it calms down a bit in the morning, I’m certain she’ll be only too happy to answer your questions.”

You swallow nervously.

“She’s awfully intimidating, isn’t she?”

“Not once you get to know her,” Roxy cuts in. “She’s pretty hilarious, actually, once you get past the… everything. And actually kind of one of the best people I’ve ever met? Like, legit, y’know what she does with this operation, right?”

“Sells food, alcohol, and lodging?” you reply, wondering if that is a trick question, and also a little nervous based on your lack of insight as to the matter of ‘inns’. Perhaps there are other things that are traditionally done in such establishments. Based on the skills that Kanaya has displayed thus far, the DVD extras you’re missing might be anything from dressmaking to contract murders.

“Well, yeah,” Roxy laughs. “But like, she employs a load of people - basically just freedpeople. Whenever we liberate prisoners off a ship, we bring ‘em to her if they don’t want to join a crew. She’s been doing it for as long as I can remember, gettin’ ‘em placed in apprenticeships and shit, makin’ sure they got a roof over their heads until they can figure their deal out. Seein’ as not everybody’s been on the oar for half their life n’ either doesn’t want to stick around on the seas or doesn’t have the skills to do much of anything.”

“Oh! Well that’s quite noble of her, I s’pose!” you say, relieved.

“Like I said, basically the best,” Roxy sighs, dipping her bread in her stew and taking an enthusiastic bite. “Man oh man, and this is good as hell, too. I love not cooking! Heh, almost as much as I love cooking for you ungrateful asshats.”

This is yours and Aradia’s cue to shower her with praise, and you grab onto the opportunity quite eagerly. There is no one else from whom you would accept eight consecutive meals of approximately the same fish stew without complaining ardently. Er. More ardently than you did, at least. Roxy finds this utterly hilarious.

For real, you’re starting to feel it, what Dirk said - was it only this morning?

You _fit_ , here, between your friends, basking in the warm glow of their company. You can match them in their friendly jibes. You know these social rules. You like them, even, how you get to say mostly whatever you want, how if you slip up you are certain, actually, that the harshest penalty would be a shoulder-check and a retaliatory verbal barb, to be smoothed over and forgotten almost instantaneously.

They see you as a person, you think. Not even just a crewmate. They _like_ you. They touch you without fear or desire, just for the sake of it, and you don’t - you don’t think about it. The momentum of the atmosphere carries you forward effortlessly. You belong at this table. Maybe this is what that feels like, belonging.

It feels really, really good. Not in the burning way of desire, but like a flickering candle within your ribcage, warming your heart without setting it afire.

Your nerves are slowly settling. It’s a lot like having dinner in the galley, which you’ve gotten used to, though everyone is in a remarkably good mood, for once. Not that the atmosphere on the Diamond is miserable, but you find yourself wondering just how much money you’ve actually made. You don’t really have any conception of what a ‘crown’ is worth! Or of how money works in general. That has never been your job, and you look forward to never needing to figure it out. Aradia, who is something of a lightweight, finishes another pint and proceeds to cuddle up against your arm, and you jokingly offer to slit your own throat to improve the experience for her, given her predilections, and _everyone_ laughs. You’re funny!

Someone from another table pulls out a fiddle and begins to play, which wakes her up enough to grab you and Feferi and haul you out to the mostly-unoccupied dance floor. A disaster waiting to happen, though Roxy comes with and partners with you, which makes it a bit better. Roxy, after all, can dance.

What Aradia is doing could be loosely described as dancing, possibly, though more aptly as a kind of rhythmic whole-body twitch. Based on her smile, she’s having a lot of fun with it, which is really what matters, and Feferi, who is an excellent dancer and an able partner, is working with it.

You can keep time, at least, and both you and Roxy are quite stone-cold sober, which doesn’t hurt. You don’t drink beverages with bubbles in them, if you can avoid it; carbonation causes unsightly bloating, and really, why do that to yourself? Alcohol, as well, is something you’re very careful about. Perhaps to excess. You’re quite determined when it comes to keeping yourself under control.

Roxy takes lead, and you happily follow her through a set of sort of boppy steps, still in the process of catching on to the way people typically move and what seems to be appropriate, playing it safe and surreptitiously observing as others trickle onto the small dance floor. The music, furnished by a pair of fiddle players, is lively, and you are actually, really, sincerely, wholesale having a lot of fun!

The fiddle players pause momentarily as one song concludes, seemingly switching off so one can have a break and get a drink, and Roxy whirls away with Feferi to chase down some mutual acquaintance, leaving you to grin and compliment Aradia’s dancing. She offers to teach you, and you delightedly accept; it’s actually a lot more difficult than it looks, especially in the complete absence of music.

In the Velvet Court, though or at least in _Starlight’s End_ , no one seems to have any inclination to bother people busily making fools of themselves, and for the first time, you find something you really, truly like about the place, other than the immediate company.

She’s midway through encouraging you to loosen your shoulders and imagine a cord connecting you to the ceiling from your sternum when Dirk _finally_ shows up, Vriska sitting atop his shoulders, waving her arms around gleefully as yet another cheer rises from the center table at their entrance.

For a second, you think the yellowish gleam from her hook is attributable to the general tone of the lighting, but no, that is definitely a new hook, and it is definitely gold-plated, or at least gold-washed. Heavens to betsy.

Upon spotting you, Dirk easily shakes Vriska from her perch - she twists in midair and lands on her feet like a cat. It’s like something out of a perfectly choreographed piece of theater. The crowd practically parts for him. He half-lifts, half-dips you into a close-mouthed kiss, his arm bracing you firmly by the shoulders, his hand at your waist with a chaste and gentlemanly grip.

“I love you,” he says, by way of greeting, and you smile right back, relax into his arms, and for a perfect second, all is well in the world.

At least, until you look up, and realize that Kanaya is watching you closely from behind the bar, no particular expression but neutral interest. Except you suddenly wonder if it’s neutral at all, if you’re doing something inappropriate, here. She doesn’t look away when you meet her eyes, just tilts her head curiously and raises her eyebrows, and what the devil is that supposed to mean?

Dirk sets you back on your feet, beaming, but your smile has turned unsteady and you decide to find something else to do, post-haste.

“Vriska’s new hook?” you stage whisper.

“Wait till you see it up close,” he replies. “Chunks of raw opal the size of pigeons’ eggs embedded in the thing. Might be a midlife crisis purchase. Either way, I support her.”

“S’pose you never know what mid-life actually is,” you muse. “Might as well exist in a constant state of crisis to compensate for the uncertainty.”

“Is that not what we’re already doing?” He laughs and kisses you again.

“Sounds like a plan to me. Very actionable.”

“Especially with you and Karkat absolutely - I don’t know what you two did, but we’ve never been this loaded off half a hold of loot before. _Ever_. Get yourself a gondola made of solid gold, we can afford that shit. Go hog fuckin’ wild at the bathhouse. Did you know you can get massaged by four people at once, and it’s basically the best thing ever? Because I learned that today.”

“I couldn’t possibly imagine,” you say fondly, looking over at the bar again and finding that you are no longer under direct examination, though you still feel… very odd about everything. Especially when you remember what you were doing before this. How everyone you were acting all ridiculous with is still present, Aradia still on the floor, now trying to get Equius to dance, with far less success than she had with you.

Existing in a shared space like this is a very strange experience indeed.

“Oh, shit, check it out,” Dirk says, indicating a small cluster of people by the wall. “Dartboard’s open.”

“Hm?” you ask, extricating yourself from your own tangled thoughts with some effort.

“C’mon, let’s go,” he says, back to bulldozing his way through the crowd as you follow.

It turns out that he’s talking about a round board affixed to the wooden panelling, divvied up into sections and colors that are both familiar and unfamiliar. You squint at it as he pulls a bunch of fletched darts free of the thing, eyes widening when you realize what it is.

“Ever played?” he asks, taking his place next to you at a line marked in the floorboards of the tavern.

“Janey and I used to play a game much like this - the board was a little different, of course, and it wasn’t exactly… darts, but the idea is the same,” you explain, grateful that something about your childhood, at least, might prove an advantage at some skill without horrifying Dirk.

“Darts, but not-darts?” he asks, frowning.

“If anyone in this tavern can spare a pistol or two, I could show you!” you offer. “Though it’s been quite a while since I played. Jane hates losing.”

“Vriska!” Dirk calls. “I need your gun!”

“Fuck you!” she retorts from across the room.

Aradia slips in from the dance floor, a fresh glass of something that smells like pure rubbing alcohol in one hand, a revolver in another.

“Don’t start a fight,” she chides Dirk, handing you the sidearm and gently delivering an open-palm bap to the back of his head. “We have weeks in port to fill, and I don’t want to run through our itinerary too quickly.”

“You’re right, you’re right,” he sighs. “Fuck you, but you’re right.”

It’s quite a nice gun. Sort of remarkable that Aradia would hand something so lovely over so easily; the grip inlaid with ebony and mother-of-pearl, shaped for ease of use and decorated with some really lovely skull and raven motifs, very classy. You had one sort of like it in your collection, though it was gold-washed like Vriska’s new hook, and you would never have even considered _using_ it, for fear of damaging it. A gift from Jane, forever and a half ago. You’re still not sure if she commissioned it or simply recognized the rather gaudy thing as _exactly_ your taste, but either way, she hit the nail on the head with that one.

This one is good too, though.

You just sort of miss it, that’s all. And it’s suddenly much easier to remember than usual, other times you’ve stood in precisely this way, sizing up precisely this sort of target, for precisely this errand.

The gardens surrounding the palace are vibrantly green no matter the time of year. It would have been late autumn, on the verge of lapsing into winter, a chill and a certain dry taste to the air, though the flowers bloomed no less beautifully and the trees were no less laden with fruit. Your hands would have still been slightly sticky from an orange plucked from a branch, half offered to Jane, half for you. Hardly a ritual, just as natural as breathing, sharing with her. While she’s always been fairly tall of stature, you’re taller; commanding as she may be, you’re several months her senior, and for much of your life, you were possessed of the idea that you should be taking care of her in some way, as a result of that.

Ridiculous, in hindsight. She has always been immeasurably more capable in all respects. The follies of youth, nonetheless, persist in memory. The fragrance of blossoming jasmine hangs heavy in the air.

You stand, a good fifteen meters from a cloth-over-wood target, bright colors faded from exposure to the sun. Feel your way to the center of it, a handgun in your grip, tilt your head slightly to test your trajectory, aim, and squeeze the trigger.

These models don’t have much in the way of recoil, so it’s no difficult task to fire off two more shots, all within a centimeter or two of each other, all within the yellow center ring, about the size of a grapefruit.

Grapefruit are also ripe. When you were younger, you would wake up early and pick a few to bring to the table for breakfast every morning, at this time of year. The servants found it quite a bother, and mother never really noticed, much, but Jane found it delightful and you would wear the rinds as funny hats once you’d picked them dry.

That was nice.

You don’t live with Jane and mother anymore, though. Haven’t in a few years, though you have a habit of finding your way back to the gardens, throwing kumquats or peach pits at Jane’s window until she joins you for a round or two of _jacio_ and a bit of talk. You want to say that you miss her, but you hesitate to seem ungrateful for your lot. She might tell mother on you. That’s happened a few times - easier for her to do, since she sees mother regularly and you don’t.

Leaving three rounds in the pistol, you offer it to her with what you think is quite a rakish grin.

[ _How are you doing that_?] Jane demands.

[ _It’s easy_!] you insist. [ _You’ve just got to… okay, watch, are you watching_?]

She is, reluctantly, as you try to mime it out without slipping into your focused-on-the-target zone. Neither of you play _jacio_ quite the same way as the common folk of Aetria, since firearms aren’t widely available outside of certain social strata, nor are they much needed, but it’s the royalty-appropriate recreational activity to which you are best disposed. That’s partially why it’s so difficult to explain; your aptitude with a firearm is exactly that, an _aptitude_ , entirely distinct from conscious efforts on your part.

But you’ve been looking forward to spending this time with Jane for ages, damn it, you’re both always so busy these days. Your thirteenth birthday is rapidly approaching, and afterwards, you’ll be expected to take your vows and formally cloister yourself for the next stage of training, for which you are quite excited, really. It’s just that it means even less free time for tearing about in the gardens with your sister. _Far_ less, since you’re technically not supposed to leave the devotional temple run by the retired _caro supellecta_ at all, but you expect to break that rule quite a lot. How are you meant to go years without seeing Janey and mother outside of supervised meetings? The sheer audacity of that expectation is as hilarious as it is appalling.

Even though Jane’s been awfully busy with her own schooling, of late, and doesn’t seem to think quite so much of you as she used to - well, that’s just unfounded speculation on your part, and probably unfair to her. She’ll be making new friends, just as you have been meeting fascinating new people in the course of your training. That’s hardly reason to cast aspersions. Mother always says, in a roundabout way, that you’re destined for different things, you and Janey. She’s in with her sort, you with yours, and that’s as well as things can be expected to go. Better, even, since you’ve rather excelled in your own studies, if you do say so yourself.

[ _You’ve simply got to… bother, how to explain,_ ] you grumble, feeling her attention beginning to waver as one of her eyebrows climbs slightly above the other. [ _Er, feel it? Does that make sense? Feel exactly where you are, inhabit the space, all the way through to the barrel of the gun, see, and then… keep feeling all the way to where you want to… imagine that every molecule of air is touching, and find the path between yourself and the target. Does that make sense?_ ]

[ _Not in the slightest,_ ] she sighs, [ _but I wouldn’t expect it to. Are you allergic to straight answers?_ ]

You laugh, a little sadly, because you’d been hoping for a different response, and pass her the gun.

[ _Here,_ ] you suggest, noting that the positioning of her arm is a little off and reaching over to correct it. [ _You can’t see it from your perspective, but you’re angled down_ -]

[ _Don’t touch me,_ ] she snaps, a red flush spreading across her cheeks as she jerks away from your hand. [ _Don’t they teach you that you ought not to, anymore?_ ]

[ _Oh. Right. Sorry,_ ] you say, because she _is_ right, and you _are_ sorry.

Her shot lands, skewed down nearly to the base of the target, and she curses.

You don’t try to argue any further, or whatever it is that you were doing. Probably arguing, which would explain why it so thoroughly gave her the pip, mother doesn’t take kindly to that sort of thing either. Jane will be expected to rule someday, and she’ll do a right bangup job of it, you’re sure. Even the suggestion of insolence would surely sting, given the formal stratification between the two of you that seems to grow every time you see her.

After this particular incident, you stop touching her altogether, which is horrible, because you were so very close as children, you slept in the same bed more often than not, for fuck’s sake, but even a whisper of impropriety between siblings would be catastrophic to her future, and any time you touch someone, it has a meaning, now, and not an innocent one.

You turn thirteen on one of the first cold days of winter, and you receive the _immulatio_ , sewn on to indicate your progression in your field, and you don’t sneak out to see Jane half as much as you thought you would. Or at all, after the first time goes righteously belly-up. You miss her birthday and barely register it. New concerns all-consumingly occupy your attention. It is harder work than you anticipated, in some ways. Different. But you’re very good at it. Everyone says so.

When next you see her, the both of you are sixteen, and you scarcely recognize each other. You play _jacio_ again, with a whole crowd of partygoers celebrating the anniversary of mother’s ascension to the throne, and she’s as terrible at shooting as ever, doesn’t meet your hopeful smile with anything but a deepening of the frown line between her eyebrows when you playfully bring it up. 

So you stop bringing it up, even as she struggles, even when you really think that you could probably help. You’ve gotten a little better at explaining things. If there’s anything you can put words to, now, it’s precisely how bodies work, and how best to use them.

She never really learns to call the target to her, to make the gun into an extension of herself. Even in combat, she prefers long-shafted and thrusting weapons, while you have always found that sort of business unpleasant, find comfort in the removal of projectiles and the impersonality of firearms.

Perhaps it means something, that you can’t seem to think of all of that past in the past-tense, where it definitely belongs.

What you can do, now as well as you could when you were little more than a child, is see yourself, feel yourself, as though from an outside perspective. Dirk and Aradia shout for the rest of the patrons to shut up and get out of the way, but you hardly hear it.

You inhabit every centimeter of your body, and precisely none of it. Aradia’s revolver is light, a little unbalanced; it’s only half-loaded, and you compensate with your grip, as easy as drawing breath. Your eyes flicker up to meet Dirk’s, and he grins encouragingly, nods as if to say go on.

The path is clear, the mass of drunken revelers having parted very effectively to your friends’ chidings and the threat of a reasonably large, increasingly physically capable man holding a gun the way someone else might hold a pen. Like you could easily forget it was even there.

“Ready, then?” you say, mustering up the buoyancy of tone that you know will ease the tension.

“Don’t put holes in my walls,” Kanaya calls from behind the bar. “It may shock you to learn that this would critically alter my ‘intact walls’ feng shui.”

“Worry not!” you reply without even thinking about it. “I don’t miss.”

You heft the pistol again. Four chambers full, you’d wager.

Then, you squeeze the trigger four times in quick succession. It gets a bit boring, you’ve found, going exclusively for the middle bit. More effort goes into it if you shake it up slightly.

So you shoot the tiny metal numerals for the twenty, the fifteen, and the sixteen clean off the board, and sink the last one in the tiny red circle in the center of the bullseye. Jane would say you were showing off, which would be accurate, but here’s the thing. Maybe you want to, just a little.

Coming down from it is always a strange experience, but necessary, especially with the effort you have to funnel into putting yourself into the right headspace, these days, but two things strike you near-simultaneously. Dirk hoists your arm up, empty revolver still in hand, as though he’s presenting the victor of some tremendous feat of athletic daring to the packed tavern. And Kanaya, over the rising flurry of reactions from the crowd, shouts ‘you’re paying for the dartboard.’ You giggle incredulously, sheer nerves finally overwhelming you as your awareness-of-self fades back into normal range and your hyperfocus loosens its grip on the base of your skull.

The lights set in sconces on the wood-panelled walls of the tavern seem to dim, then brighten, strains of music and other people’s conversations coalescing into a background hum. Dirk’s arm is draped over your shoulders, and you settle against him, touching as much of his body as you can manage to.

It wasn’t always like this. It used to just be comforting, to be touching, to be touched. You chase the last vestige of the memory. His body is firm and solid. That’s the trouble with remembering. It gets you thinking that things used to be so much better, even though you’re pretty sure nostalgia is just a dirty liar, airbrushing the stains and defects from the picture.

Though the gun is empty, you squeeze a few times at the trigger, a gesture that is unquestionably calming, uncolored by any confusion, and you feel a great deal better as the chambers click through, empty. It’s a good noise.

“Didn’t tell me you could do that,” Dirk whispers, his lips nearly against your ear, still barely audible over the din. You think Vriska may be buying drinks for everyone, unlikely as that sounds. How sloshed is she? Regardless, you shudder a bit before you remind yourself that what you just did was quite impressive, and he is definitely not mad at you for it. “Shoulda got you a gun sooner.”

“You didn’t ask, darling,” you say, which is exactly what you _would_ say, should say, and you turn to meet him in a deep kiss.

Roxy cheers, and you nearly jolt out of your skin all over again, releasing Dirk like he’s a red-hot teakettle, your face warm and flushed. That freaks you out a bit, too, your own instinctive flinch-away, which has never been your reaction before, but he doesn’t seem troubled, just turns to flip her off very subtly as you wobble on your feet, blinking, wondering if it was always so jam-fucking-packed in _Starlight’s End_.

“I’m, ah, I think I’ll run and fetch a drink, quick as you like,” you murmur, shifting away into the crowd, not trusting yourself, right now.

Dirk is already in the process of spinning Roxy into a dance, though he smiles when he makes brief eye contact with you before you’re enveloped completely by the throng of revelers, endeavoring to thread your way between elbows and shoulders. Several people try to pat you on the back, and you grit your teeth, not shying away from the foreign hands, but not stopping, either, until you reach an unoccupied stool and lean your entire weight on the slightly sticky surface of the bar.

Too quickly to be coincidental, Kanaya practically materializes in front of you, wearing the same inscrutable expression as before.

“What can I do for you, Jake?”

“You’re making me nervous,” you begin, a touch accusingly. “I do wish you’d cut it out, with the - the staring, there’s nothing to see, cross my heart.”

“I don’t mean to be overbearing. But you are exhibiting signs of distress.”

“I’m exhibiting signs of needing a damned drink,” you insist. “Do you sell anything that doesn’t come in a tankard?”

“Certainly. Wine, some spirits.”

“Something red.”

“Of course.” She produces an unlabelled bottle from beneath the counter, uncorks it effortlessly, and plucks what is actually a _cordial glass_ from some storage space above the bar, filling it half-full.

“Leave the bottle?”

It comes out more of a plea than you strictly intended, and her eyebrows knit together in concern as she withdraws the vessel of wine.

“I’ll be pleased to serve you further, as you require it.”

You sigh exaggeratedly and have a go at draining the glass in a single, dramatic draught, but this fails resoundingly as you remember that you can’t stand the taste of alcohol, and you very nearly spit the mouthful of shockingly strong wine all over yourself. Nearly. But, of course, you don’t.

“I’d hope you might tell me, if something was the matter,” she says, and the practiced nonchalance of her voice is positively grating. Oh, she’s good, but not as good as you are. You take another sip of wine to gather yourself.

“You’re _really_ too kind,” you reply, infusing your voice with twice as much syrupy politesse, to make it very clear what you think of that approach, bizarre as it is that she would have any interest in your troubles (or lack thereof!) whatsoever. Rather forgetting, in the heat of the moment, that you are hoping to charm some information out of her at some later point. It _bothers_ you, being seen like this by a virtual stranger. Sea King’s chosen or not, there is absolutely no way she understands a fraction of your _situation_. She is probing with a blunt instrument for information, and it won’t work. Not on _you_.

“Perhaps I am,” she says evenly, and disappears for a moment to assist one of the serving staff with a challenging cask of ale.

You stare into the deep red liquid in the cut-crystal glass, almost certainly robbed from some port or trader or another, destined for a finer household or establishment than this, and finish the wine. It gets easier, once the taste is already in your mouth. You resolve to ask for more, even if you’d prefer not to have to. How difficult would it be to just leave you the damned bottle and - and put the whole thing on your tab, or however she collects payment for the enormous amount of alcohol currently being consumed?

While you don’t really know how that works, you still hunch your shoulders around your empty glass in irritation, not even caring about your posture at all. Maybe just slightly. Maybe it twists between your ribs a little, the thought that leaning inward all hunched and _ugly_ , unforgivably ugly, like this, is somewhere between disobedience and an active and willful transgression. But you don’t want anyone looking at you, anymore. It’s too much, all of these people, too many conflicting expectations. Enough to fucking short-circuit your brain. It was so much easier when you had a clear thing to be. Something you were good at. Or even something you were utter shit at, on the Black Diamond!

How the hell are you supposed to be Roxy’s friend and Dirk’s boyfriend or whatever the hell and Karkat’s unwilling apprentice and everyone else’s crewmate and then - and then everything else to all of the other people here, people you don’t know at all, with whom you share no common culture or common set of social expectations? People like Kanaya, too, who _see_ you - surely that is your own fault, because you are so incompetent at performing the role they expect of you, and it shows, your discomfort. That is exactly what you are not supposed to be showing. Exactly what you do not, under any circumstances, show to anyone.

You realize that she has returned only when the neck of the bottle nudges into your field of vision and your glass is, once again, partially full.

“Too kind though I may be, I am increasingly concerned on your behalf,” she says gently. “It might assuage my worries, if you were to share something of your circumstances. How you came to return here.”

“What’s to tell?” you say shortly, glancing up to meet her eyes. They are strikingly green, much like your own. “I’ve already told you. I’m a pirate, now. Clearly.”

“You are a young man critically out of his element.”

“Excellent observation! Surely a great deal of detective work went into that one, should hook you up with Janey, she’d be just about blown over by that immense feat of deductive reasoning. Have you got a deerstalker tucked under that scarf?”

She smiles thinly, and you remember that you are thousands of miles away from anyone with any knowledge of your sister’s proclivity for mystery novels. Hell, you don’t even know if that’s still a thing with her. Haven’t talked to her about anything but affairs of the state in long enough. She doesn’t have a lot of interest in your perspective on anything else, or even really on that, so long as you make your intentions not to step on her toes abundantly clear.

And that’s certainly gone to hell in a handbasket, the not stepping on toes thing, hasn’t it.

“I’m sorry,” you add quietly. “That was rude of me. I am aware that you are trying to help, because that seems to be the kind of person you are. I don’t need any help. I have had more than enough helping in the last few months. Possibly enough for a lifetime. I am quite done with the business.”

“I understand,” she says. “And I am not offended. Please do be aware that I am here to talk, should you have interest.”

You can’t imagine that you will, but you muster up a smile that hopefully suggests that your engaging in such a thing is a potentiality. She smiles back, and turns to help attend to the mess of people surging around the bar, empty flagons in hand.

After a few more minutes staring at your remarkably stationary wine-filled cordial glass, you remember that ‘talking to her’ was actually exactly what you wanted to accomplish from the moment you heard of her existence, and that perks you up a little. No one has attempted to talk to you since you sat down, which is nice, and the perfusion of blood to your face and chest brought on by the wine is kind of pleasant. Also a cue to slow down; you are a miserable lightweight, owed mostly to the fact that you rarely drink at all, if you can avoid it.

“I don’t actually know much about the Velvet Court,” you begin carefully when she circles back.

“Oh? Well, this place has a fascinating history to match the colorful present,” she says, snorting. It is an enviably adorable snort.

“You did mention that something was afoot, earlier. I don’t suppose that’s something you’d be interested in talking about?” you suggest.

“What’s to tell?” she says, with a cheeky smile. “I jest, of course. I can’t say for certain what forces are at work, but Captain Serket brings… shall we say, _portentous_ winds with her whenever she makes port. And the man who gave you trouble today is not the only surprising visitor that has passed through of late.”

“So you know Vriska, then.”

“As well as anyone but the Queen does, I imagine. I was among the first to their side when they staged the Scourge Uprising. I do have a soft spot for uprisings, as well as their progenitors, though not necessarily as a rule.”

“Yes. Well. They recently toppled my country of origin,” you sigh. “Seems it’s a habit with her.”

“I’m sorry to hear that,” Kanaya says, with kindness that feels too sincere to be anything but. “The story is a familiar one these days. One can’t ignore the casualties of violently evolving political circumstances.”

“I don’t know,” you say. “I really don’t know how I feel about any of it. Or any of this, honestly. I don’t know a thing about the Velvet Court, but it is the only stationary home I’ve got, so might as well set about learning, right? P’raps then it’ll all feel a little less like getting tossed around like a cork on the ocean every time something new happens.”

“That is something of a common experience of the Court, I’m afraid, even for longstanding residents. The sea makes a fickle mistress, even to those who love it dearly.”

“Is that so? I’ve found her very pleasant,” you say, as casually as you can manage.

“Then you must be quite a rare person, Jake English.” Her smile is soft, her expression appraising. “Where are you staying? Do you have somewhere to sleep tonight?”

“I think so? Here?” You shrug illustratively.

“Your name is not on my registry, but it could be, if you would -”

“Ha, I don’t even know how I’d -” you cut in, then pause. “I don’t think I have any money? Er, sorry, I do hope you’ve been putting this wine on my crew’s tab, though I could… I’ve got these rings, I could spare… one, if it’s necessary. But if you check for a Dirk Strider, I s’pose I’d be staying with him?”

Her smile thins back to a line.

“Yes. That would make sense. You ought to have a key to your own room, though, and your name on the roster. I’ll fetch one before you head upstairs.”

“It’s not a terribly big deal at all! Heh. I just don’t really get how any of this works, yet. I - you could tell immediately. I _am_ out of my element, here.”

“Freedom takes some getting used to, I would agree. You wouldn’t happen to have a trade, would you? Other than piracy, of course.”

You are suddenly gripped by the concern that you have said far, _far_ too much, and you close your mouth so quickly that it is probably audible.

“I’ll take that key, if it’s all the same to you,” you say shortly. “I, ah, I believe I feel… a case of the vapors coming on, it is so terribly warm in here, I don’t usually… imbibe quite so much, you understand.”

She raises an eyebrow. “As you like it. You’ll be in room eight. In the corner of the building. That is my copy. Eventually I’ll be wanting it back.”

Producing a massive ring of keys from a pocket concealed over her hip, she twists one free, looks at it for a second, and presses it into your hand. Her palm is cool and dry.

With a swish of her skirts and a polite nod, she disappears to some back room, and you feel a breath you didn’t realize you were holding escape from between your lips, not entirely sure what just went wrong, but certain that _something_ did. You empty your second glass and push away from the bar. You need to get upstairs, to… just to get out of here, immediately.

Dirk has left the dance floor, and is back at the Black-Diamond-appropriated table leaning into some kind of intense conversation with - your stomach drops for the second time in as many minutes - Karkat. Perhaps it is not too late to preempt… whatever will inevitably happen next, a conversation that you desperately do not want to have. You make a beeline for his side, join him at the table. Can’t quite slip in between them, but you don’t need to do that. Just need to put an end to this confusing evening before you mess something else up critically.

“Hey, what’s up -” Dirk starts to say, but you’re already practically in his lap.

“I want to get out of here,” you purr, banking on a combination of honesty and the noise level of the tavern to keep him from recognizing your tone as anything but total normalcy.

His arms around you are impossibly welcome, and you relax incrementally for what feels like the first time in hours as he runs his fingertips over your shoulder. He smells so good. You want to bury your face in his neck and never leave.

“We were just talkin’ about you, actually,” he says. “Could’ve told me about the guy who nearly fuckin’ killed the both of you a little earlier, maybe.”

“I’m sorry,” you begin immediately, though he cuts you off, holds you tighter against him.

“Dude. You don’t have to apologize for your brush with death. S’my fault, really, how many months on a ship was that without even trying to teach you how to hold your own in a fight? Intro-level pirate shit. Now we’ve got a new project. No problem.”

You frown against his neck, quickly remedy the frowning situation, and scoot back to get a better read on him. He’s smiling _very_ sincerely. Almost alarmingly so, were it not for the circumstances, the day’s apparent inundation of gold, the prospect of getting a sword or whatever in your hands, all of that is right up his alley.

Unfortunately, it rather makes you want to find someplace to empty your stomach of the wine, which is suddenly roiling like something _alive_.

This is exactly what you don’t want.

Of course it would be terribly cool to fight side-by-side with him, any swashbuckler worth their salt would be practically chomping at the bit at the prospect of oiling up for a good ol’ fashioned instructional scrum or whatever the hell. You are no different! Entirely dazzled by the opportunity! Totally sold on the whole steel-on-steel violence thingummy, can’t wait to get into it wholesale! Bring on the murder!

It’s just.

Well.

It’s something from before. You’ve already tried that, the whole swordsmanship thing, and you were no good at it, really. Barely in the same area code as ‘decent’. For all the reasons that have so recently bubbled back up - you hesitate. You get nervous. You give up, and holding a sword is antithetical to giving up, _no one_ will let you give up once you’ve swung a blade at them a few times, they get very stabby about the business.

Really, it’s one thing to put your efforts to learning skills you’ve never even considered before. It’s something entirely distinct, when it’s something you already know you’re utter shit at. Even with all the trappings of a literal friggin’ prince to your advantage, you weren’t cut out for this sort of thing, not a bit.

It’s just that you were really hoping something would be different. That it was something wrong with your circumstances, not something wrong with you, that everything would change once you hopped aboard the Black Diamond and joined a crew and remodelled yourself in their image.

But it’s not. You’re not a fighter, not a killer, save for in the most limp-wristed, plausible-deniability-shielded sorts of ways, snake in the damn grass that you are and always have been. It is not for lack of wanting it, nor for lack of justifiable opportunity, or you would have closed a stalwart, unshaking hand around Karkat’s knife and chopped the block off the world’s most block-choppable son of a bitch, a literal cutlass to the neck of your actual crewmate, and if that wasn’t enough…

The wine is not helping either.

You press your face against Dirk’s shoulder and try to catch your breath, calm down, so you can be normal for him. He kisses the top of your head, ruffles your hair, and resumes talking to Karkat about the very incident you so desperately don’t want to be thinking about right now.

“Never seen the fucker before. English here seemed to think he was an Ampora when the Megidos came by to cart him off, which would explain a lot of things but also jack shit. Look, I’ll try to parse details with Kanaya in the morning. There’s a bottle of something really fuckin’ strong and a blackout calling my name, alright?”

“Got it,” Dirk says, running his fingertips absentmindedly through your hair. “Sorry again about Mituna, bro. I know he -”

“Yeah, yeah, he meant a lot to me. I’ll fill you in tomorrow,” Karkat, your new favorite person, says, as he pats Dirk on the back and pushes his chair away from the table, his attention immediately diverted elsewhere.

“Upstairs?” you ask hopefully.

“Hard to say no to that,” he laughs, still with the nigh-unnatural sense of buoyancy. “Kind of overwhelming, I get it. Takes getting used to. Fuck, I remember the first time we all hit _Starlight’s End_ \- and that was literally hours post-coup, bodies still floating in the canal, first hot meal any of us’d had in months. Real shock to the system. I love this place. But I do get it.”

“Mm,” you agree, entirely not listening to any of what he’s saying, only processing his words as sort of rumbling vibrations in his chest and throat.

“C’mon, ‘less you want me to carry you up,” he says, and you jolt back into your body, pull your face from his neck, and smile as you shakily find your feet.

You would actually like him to carry you very much, but you think the optics might be a little iffy, given what you’re pretty sure Kanaya and probably everyone else along with her thinks is going on here. What Dirk hasn’t caught on to just yet. You don’t want to say anything on the topic aloud, but you can’t let him unintentionally make matters worse in his innocence to the circumstances.

Obviously he’s not wronging you in any way. He never has, he’s _always_ done his level best to do right by you, even when you’ve made it very difficult. You’ll just have to explain that to Kanaya, once you’re no longer flushed and anxious and a bit tipsy. Not the best place to be when explaining things.

“Pretty sure we’ve still got some weapons from the hold,” Dirk says conversationally, steering you through the crowd. “Maybe we can start with more familiar blades. Hell, I can learn right with you, Aetrian swords ain’t exactly my area of expertise. Could be fun.”

“I don’t know if that would be necessary,” you protest.

“Don’t think there’s a lot to teach you about shooting, especially not from me. Roxy’d probably love it, though, hang out, shoot the shit, literally shoot some shit. Fuck, I’m just so glad you’re here. Sucks that you had that kind of reintroduction to the Court, but there’s seriously so much to love about this place. You’re going to fit right in.”

“Sure do hope so,” you say, without much conviction.

You don’t have it in you to argue that point, or any point, really. There are more than enough distractions on the way to the rickety staircase to keep him modestly occupied; people looking to greet him, to strike him on the back, to shout his name in acknowledgement. It’s a little like navigating the canal with Karkat, but far more existentially unsettling. Dirk has an entire life, here. People you’ve never met sure do seem to know him well enough to seize him by the shoulder and ask him how he’s been without getting a knife to the ribs. Unsavory characters and people you’d never make as pirates alike.

At least he seems to pick up on the fact that you’re a tad bit too overwhelmed for introductions, skillfully maneuvers around a few curious inquiries, and keeps up a reasonable momentum towards the exit. You aid in this process by looking slightly confused and probably a little ill, which is not much of a stretch, until you make it out of the throng and partway up the stairs, at which point you finally relax.

Once upon a time, the corner room on the top floor of Starlight’s End seemed punishingly cramped. After months at sea in the tiny first mate’s stateroom, you are positively struck dumb by its capaciousness. The walls are whitewashed, the linen is fresh, the windows open and veiled by thin curtains, illuminated to a soft yellow glow by the streetlamps hanging outside the tavern.

The immensity of your relief at being alone with him, free of conflicting expectations, is indescribable. It’s like taking a breath after too long underwater, all accompanying mental clarity included. You find your tongue, reground yourself in the sensations of what is currently happening, shift focus entirely to Dirk. It is really a shame that you ever have to divert your attention elsewhere, frankly. That would be so much simpler!

He wastes no time in stripping down, rolling onto the bed, and smiling up at you in his underclothes. You haven’t had a visit to the bathhouse, yet, and take a little longer in the process of washing up a bit with the small cake of soap and pitcher of water provided, but you gratefully snuggle in next to him once you’re done, shutting the window and drawing the little curtain in the process. It’s chilly out there.

“So,” he says, once you’re nestled in his arms, already in the process of feeling better, no longer minding the warm and relaxed feeling conferred by the wine. “Apart from the murder, how was your day?”

He takes your hands and begins to kiss them, as he sometimes does.

“Wonderful in all respects,” you say, focusing selectively on the parts that actually _were_ wonderful in all respects, such as this one.

“Gettin’ better at lying,” he says, tapping your knuckles indicatively with a smile. “Said that without a shake.”

You frown and withdraw your hand, though the kissing was quite nice. “Wasn’t lying, dear heart.”

“I’m not actually blind, dude. Something’s bothering you, and feel free to let me know if I’m wrong, but I somehow doubt it’s the perfectly-timely death of the guy you’d literally never met. Never seen you get rattled about a knife to someone else’s throat, either. Did it throw you? Something about that? You can like… tell me, y’know. I actually _want_ to know. Promise.”

Oh, you are well and truly done with people trying to wheedle such indignities as ‘the truth’ out of you tonight.

“It’s an adjustment,” you finally say. “Wished you were there. That’s all.”

He sighs, clearly not satisfied by that explanation. But it’s true. No trembling necessary, zero uncertainty about what you’re saying. You _did_ wish he was there. And for the moment, that _is_ all. All you want to say. With any luck, he will not resume talking about… training you, or whatever the hell, you very much do not want to be trained, or to think about this subject any further.

“I missed you,” you add, lowering your voice and leaning in closer, mouthing softly at his jaw.

Immediately, like flicking a switch, you are fully into it. Gears shifted. Everything else ignored. To be fair, you are never _not_ into it, and even considering that as an abstract premise contradicts a lot of important conclusions of which you are completely certain. Among them, the immutable fact that his hair is tousled handsomely, that the light filtering in through the room’s windows is illuminating his face in a way that is most becoming, that you know, for a fact, that it would be a tremendous joy and a comfort to get as close to him as you possibly can. That he smells like jasmine oil and soap and fresh linen, and that in addition to the rest of your notably unscrupulous desires, you’d very much like to press your face against his neck and simply breathe for a little while.

Yes, easy as it is to get things all muddled, this is precisely what you want right now, and once you clarify that for yourself, what follows is a very simple unraveling of your mess of anxieties. You know this story, you know the words you need to tell it to yourself, you’re clinically aware of every shift in the set of his shoulders, every hitch to his breathing, every shudder in his chest and anticipatory tremor in his wrists. He feels the way things have shifted, too, and relaxes to allow you access to his throat.

Blindfolded and with your hands tied behind your back, you could track and parse these qualities in anyone. Dirk, well, you’d know Dirk in your sleep. You would know him dead.

You feel your own breathing steady completely, and reach up to caress his face, pausing with your index finger tip-tilting his chin, the better to look up at him through your eyelashes. “Missed you terribly, as a matter of fact.”

With that, you’re shifting your attentions lower, thinking that you’d really like to suck him off a few times, feel his hands in your hair as he comes, that would definitely make you feel better and everything would be right, and he smells so nice, you just want to _taste_ him. But as you settle on that course of action, his fingers twine tighter in your hair, and he pulls you up, arresting you momentarily.

“Holy shit,” he breathes, though it sounds _off_ , and you glance up, brow furrowed, to meet his eyes.

“Is something the ma-”

“You don’t want to talk about this.”

“Well, clearly, I think,” you say, blinking in confusion, trying to tug away and get back to business.

“No, Jake. Fuckin’ -” he rolls away, shifting to what looks like a rather uncomfortable position on his side, rather thoroughly foiling your designs. “You - you always do this. Fucking hell, you _always_ do this. I’m so _stupid_.”

“Not at all!” you object, shaking free of his grip and pulling away to the other side of the bed.

He rakes his hand through his hair, looking over at you with widening eyes.

“ _Every_ time?”

“I have no _idea_ what you could be talking about, my love, and you are kind of freaking me out right now, actually!”

“Fucking _Gods_ , I have to be the most gullible piece of shit… you… I’m just… give me a second here, dude.” He laughs as though he’s entirely at a loss for words.

For your part, you are no longer merely _kind of_ freaking out, but you hide it very well and maturely by burying your face in the pillow and not looking at him.

“Can you not do that?” he asks, after a second, and you look up reluctantly. “Uh, so, I’m going to try to be, like, an adult right now, and talk to you like a person, because you’re a person, who I happen to love a lot. Let’s just be clear on that shit from the offset. I love you so much.”

You stare up at him with your widest-eyed, innocently-confused-and-maybe-a-little-hurt-est expression. It is not a difficult emotion to access. You don’t have to dig very deep for it at all. He blinks and averts his gaze, clearing his throat in evident discomfort.

“Fuck’s sake, dude, you get why this is… a little unsettling on my end, right? I - did I - okay, I definitely started acting like… things were cool and fine. Probably too fast. Seeing as I _really_ wanted them to be cool and fine. But what I’m picking up on, here, is that things might not be, or have been, cool and fine. In the sex department. And actually I’m kind of kicking myself over that one, because, like, of course, it’s been a couple of months versus your entire fuckin’ life, it’s insane to act like I can just… love you better, somehow, that’s not how shit works outside of stories. So I guess… we should talk about this. And uh. Can I start by asking, _full honesty_ , does it make you feel like I don’t love you when we have sex? ‘Cause I can’t… do that to you. If it doesn’t feel like love.”

It feels a little like he’s slapped you several times across the face. You freeze, because the alternative is untenable. Crying, probably, which is not something you ever want to do in front of him again. You’re better now. You don’t do that, because people who are better do not cry when confronted with totally unfounded and frankly offensive speculation that they may not actually be better.

“I really like having sex with you,” you say softly.

Then you shut that shit down right away, immediately, because you can feel a tremor rising in your chest and spreading to your hands and your whole body is threatening to shake and give you away, but you _aren’t lying_ , you’re just scared the way you get when you lie, for no reason.

And apparently it’s the wrong answer, because his face falls, and he’s staring at you like you’re something _helpless_ and _pathetic_ , and you thought he was over that, you thought he was done looking at you like that, you hate it so much, both the way it feels and the fact that you think he’s probably right, that him looking at you like this must be the clearest he’s ever seen you.

“I love you?” you add, but it comes out as a question and you think that probably makes it worse.

He rolls over on his back, threading his fingers through his hair. At some point today, he must have gotten it bleached again, because his roots are completely gone. You want to touch it, and you want to touch him, you want to be touching him so badly, but he can see it, now, what it means when you touch him. Nothing innocent or good or pure, all wanting. And you made him a part of that, and you’d do it again in a second if it could undo what he’s just realized about you, make it go back to how it was.

“Okay,” he says after a second. “So this is pretty fucked up, huh. I really fucked this up. You’re doing… a bit. This is, like, a _bit_. Fuckin’ Stockholm Syndrome, part two. Do you actually want any of this?”

Obviously, of course you do. You want him. It catches in your throat before you can say it, though.

You want him to love you.

Right now there is literally nothing you want more than that. Which is funny, actually. It is a little fucked up, when you think about it too hard, how you kind of felt the same way about your mother, when she was alive. Like you would have clawed the love out of her, if you could have. It’s the only thing you know how to want.

He keeps saying it, making the right faces and forming the right words, but you can’t believe it. You will never believe it. You want something impossible from him. And Dirk Strider, in the time you have known him, has done at least three certifiably impossible things, but he could tear his own heart out and feed it to you from his hands and it would still not be enough.

Maybe you just want love to be something impossible, because then it’s okay, it’s fine, it makes sense that no one ever -

“I’m really trying,” you say.

He shifts again, trying to look you in the eyes, but you don’t let him. You think that you would almost certainly cry, and if you start now, you will probably never stop.

“I don’t… want you… to have to try,” he says haltingly. “I really, really don’t want this to be something you have to… put on a game face and fake your way through. I swear to all four Gods, that’s the last thing I want.”

“Then what _do_ you want?” you demand, turning to face him properly. “How am I supposed to know, and tell you, if all you can tell _me_ are things you don’t want? _What do you want_? Please just tell me what you actually want! _Please_ , Dirk!”

No answer. Just that same horrible expression, and you can feel your eyelashes getting wet, blood rushing to the surface of your face in an unsightly flush, and that is not going to help at all. All crying has ever done for you is make you uglier, and no one likes that.

“I want you to trust me with who you really are,” he says.

“But I’m not anything. No one is anything, really. We're all just meat. Being anything but meat is pretending,” you say.

The inner corners of your eyes prick, hot with tears. You try to squinch them closed, keep them in, but it doesn’t work. They fall against the white linen covering of the duvet, turning it grey with moisture where they make impact.

“Jake,” he says, very soft and gentle, reaching for your shoulder.

“Don’t _touch me_ ,” you snap, suddenly furious, burning from the inside out, as though with a match tossed onto dry wood. “Don’t _fucking_ touch me. Maybe you’re right! Maybe I don’t want this! I _know_ I don’t want your pity. Not for a second, Dirk, don’t you _dare_ pity me for the situation _you put me in_.”

He blinks, and for a second you can almost see the knife you’ve just twisted in his gut. But you want this to stop. You want this to be over. You want - you want him to touch you anyway, you want him to prove that he wants you, to take you by your shoulders and kiss you, to strike you across the face like you deserve, for saying that to him.

Instead, he sits up, stands almost mechanically, dresses himself as you pretend not to be watching every movement he makes, and heads for the door.

“I’m really sorry, Jake,” he says, and without another word, he leaves you alone.


	6. Horizons Unseen (or, AAAAAAAA)

The golden sunlight filtering through your window as the sun rises over the Velvet Court doesn’t look much like the end of the world. It turns the sliver of visible sky pink and purple, the clouds lined with a vivid, honeyed yellow that seems to trickle into your room, lighting up the dull white bedcover, reflecting from the handle of the glazed ceramic pitcher. Very beautiful, really, and the first time you’ve woken up in a fully stationary structure in months.

It’s the first time you’ve slept alone, too.

Whatever dream you were having slips away in the relative quiet of the morning. No creaking timbers or shouting crewmates. Movement and noise filters in from somewhere far away, but it’s quite early, probably, and the Velvet Court has not yet woken up after a night of revelry and debauchery and other sordid activities ending in -ry. You lay there, in the clean sheets, which smell slightly of some sort of herb-scented soap, and you do not think about anything.

Sometimes that’s a perfectly good activity, just sort of laying supine in a location. Unwillingly, though, you find yourself taking stock of the situation.

The sheets are cotton, you’d guess. Fairly rough, compared to the fine sheets stolen from some Aetrian noble’s home that adorned the mattress in Dirk’s stateroom. Still very pleasantly tactile when you shift about. That is nice. Small comforts, with everything burning down around your ears. How long could you stay up here, with only a wash-pitcher and a chamberpot and a set of clothes to keep you company? How long would it be before someone came looking for you?

You like the idea. Surely Roxy and Aradia, given enough time, would assume something horrible had happened to you, and they would, of course, be right, and they would hurry upstairs to find you fainted, probably in the act of perishing with a fever or a deadly cough brought on by carelessly leaving the window open in your tragic state.

The window is currently closed, but you could definitely open it.

You don’t really want to. Something about the morning light _looks_ cold, somehow, and you are really very cosy under your blanket, and you don’t want to move, ever, also. You will simply waste away here, under the covers, graceful and pale and dead by the time anyone thinks to look for you. How long does it take to starve to death? Probably not a long time, what with the way your caretakers worried when you stopped taking meals upon first being moved into the devotional temple, once mother decided you were ill-suited to a traditional princely career path. 

Of course, you caved fairly quickly, once the discomfort of hunger got the better of you and you were plied with foods that you liked, knowing that they would have had to ask mother, or at least someone on the palace staff who knew you, that _someone_ still remembered how you hated the texture of cooked vegetables, but liked them crunchy, preferred cold foods to hot, and hated every fruit but the citrus that grew on the palace grounds. You’d imagined that it was mother they’d asked, that she’d finally dropped her authoritative, queenly mask with worry over you, that you might starve for missing her so badly. Obviously, it was pathetic, and she would think so, but she already _knew_ you were pathetic, and still she wanted the best for you, clearly.

It took a while, but you came to understand that being apart from her was for the best. She knew you couldn’t be the kind of child she’d wanted, and she generously revised her expectations to something you weren’t utter shit at, and that was fine. It was fine, in the end. But you were sure you really could have done it, if you’d tried a little harder, could have withered like a flower on the vine beneath the broiling summer sun, and then she would have felt awfully bad and probably would have cried.

That’s not true. You know it, now. It would have been a disappointment to her, not a tragedy. And you were always too much of a coward to go through with that sort of thing, and that hasn’t changed. You’re already hungry, and your resolve to stay in bed Forever is wavering drastically.

No one is going to come to find you. That is just the fact of it.

You throw your head back onto your pillow and sigh. Maybe Kanaya, once she realizes that you have no money to pay for the room. At least you do not have many things to move out of it, all seven of your books packed up neatly and left on the ship. You blanch at the thought. Can you go back and get them? You would really like to have your books. After all, you can deal with just about anything with somewhere else to go, in your head. It’s only unendurable when it’s just you, you, you, an endless and morbid cavalcade of being your useless fucking self.

That is really what it comes down to. You tried. You really tried your best, and it wasn’t enough. Dirk does not want you. If you say it quickly in your head, it sounds like something that might not dig into your heart like the tip of a cold blade, for a second. Then it does, though, and you roll over to bury your face in your pillow, hike your covers up over your shoulder, and hide from it. You don’t want those words. You don’t want it to be something you can say without - without scoffing, of course he wants you, you’ve seen the way he looks at you, especially when he thinks you aren’t paying attention. You are always paying attention. You always know.

More accurately, he _wants_ to not want you. Well, fine. You can certainly sympathize with that. _Fine_. Anything Dirk wants is fine, really. You have wrecked yourself for him, shown him a part of your face that he has very reasonably concluded to be disgusting and unlovable. Finally! Took him long enough, didn’t it.

So you will take care of that for him. In a supreme act of abnegation, you will even let him keep all of your books and all of your everything and you will start afresh, and die beautifully (most of your plans currently involve dying very, very beautifully, though not by your own hand, that is too hard) in poverty and squalor, perhaps of the plague, but a sexy plague, and he will be able to move on from you completely, only a lovely and melancholic memory. Perfect. That is just what you want. You want him to be happy, and you will suffer through the remainder of your short and tragic life alone if that is what he wants, and it _is_ , you’ve figured that out quite conclusively.

You only feel a little bad about your friends and the rest of the crew. But Roxy will find someone else to help her with the fishing. Hopefully not Dirk. Maybe she’ll be able to do it herself, you’ve always felt a little like dead weight in the process, anyway. And Aradia will almost certainly like you better dead than alive, isn’t that what you always joke? And Karkat doesn’t like you much, anyway.

Those two women in the whitewashed corpse boat will come and take you away and twist the rings off your fingers and the piercings from your flesh and then you’ll just be dead and the Dead King will probably not want you either. So you will just stop existing. Easy.

You wonder where mother went, when she died. Whether there were any Gods she believed in who brought her somewhere nicer.

You’re fairly certain that she wasn’t much for believing in anything. But she probably wouldn’t have told you if she was. Maybe there are other Gods, greater Gods, governing the land and the law and the rest of the world. Existing feels like such an enormous thing, and yet, so very small, at the same time. Your life before feels like nothing more than an especially vivid dream. Even the months on the Diamond, here, in this bed, having cut it all away so succinctly, unmoored yourself completely from it - it could have happened to someone else. All of it could have been a stranger in your skin. And now whatever you are with the past hewn out of you, just a body, really, is laying here, useless and pathetic.

At least mother never lied to you about that. Dirk might have believed his own lies, but he told them nonetheless, and look where that got the both of you, when the truth inevitably proved him wrong.

You roll out of bed, leaving it unmade, and stand at the window for a second, looking down at the dark canals and shop windows below, only one or two people moving around within your range of sight, small and far away, like puppets in a theater or colorful pieces on a board. Might as well dress and join them, might as well face the music and get on with the rest of your life.

The stairs creak under the soles of your shoes as you make your way down to the tavern level, your desire for breakfast ultimately outweighing your desire to marinate alone in hopelessness, and you glance around nervously when the staircase opens up into the large main room.

No one much is about, and the tavern looks very different in the light of day. Two young women and an even younger man, barely more than a boy, are in the process of tidying up, wiping down tables and sweeping glass and refuse from the floorboards, one behind the counter, washing dishware and tankards. All look up with wide eyes at your entry, but slowly resume their activity when you don’t actually do or say anything to announce yourself or trouble them in any way. Why would you?

Someone is sitting at the bar, which is odd, because per an aging clock hanging from the wall - if it really is correct - it is just a little after eight in the morning, which is quite early for a bunch of people who have been drinking and dancing and cavorting into the wee hours of the morning. Approaching, you find Aradia perched on a barstool, slicing up an orange with a wickedly serrated black steel blade. She is missing her typical skull hair dec, which you suppose is why you didn’t recognize her immediately.

“Good morning?” you say hesitantly, slipping in next to her, not wanting to make an ass of yourself.

“Good morning!” she echoes, grinning. “Want half? I can always buy another.”

You very much do want half, actually. It has been a _very_ long time since you saw a piece of fresh fruit, let alone ate one. And you like oranges. Under normal circumstances, you might gladly thank her for the kind offer, but you merely nod once, glancing over at her hopefully.

She passes you an untouched half, and you set about peeling it and sectioning it out, grateful to have something to do.

“Do they serve breakfast, typically?” you ask.

“Not ‘till ten thirty,” she says. “Didn’t figure you for an early riser! But everyone takes to the shore differently. I personally like passing out early and waking up whenever Sollux tries to push me out of his hammock. It’s peaceful around here in the mornings, when everybody gets hammered and stays up late.”

You nod your assent, as the young woman behind the counter gestures at your orange peel, and you shrug, not interfering as she takes it away. No longer bound to material possessions. You are on the path to _true_ liberation, probably.

“Sooooo,” Aradia continues. “Are you free, then? I wouldn’t mind a walking-around partner. I’m heading to the bathhouse. The one I like opens at nine, and you’d be welcome to tag along!”

“Is that not something of a…” you pause and gesture vaguely, frowning. “Well, is it really a _mutual_ sort of activity? I wouldn’t want to… I don’t know, if it’s...”

“Oh,” she says after a second, her own brow furrowing and then relaxing as she realizes what you’re trying to not-say but also say. “Oh! Ha, not really! The one I’m thinking of is kind of just a big warm salty pool you swim around in, and then there’s showers and stuff for before and after, but like… people sometimes bring their kids, even. I promise if I’m inviting you to an orgy, you’ll know.”

“I can’t swim,” you say quietly.

“You’ll love it, then. Seriously, there’s so much dissolved salt in to keep the public pool disinfected that you can hardly stay under. Roxy could probably explain why that works better than I could, but you’d really have to _try_ to drown, and even then, I wouldn’t let you. Swear on the Dead King’s hat!”

“A very serious oath to make so lightly!”

“Well, I mean it,” she says, elbowing you in the side. “Come on, you can just shower and kick your feet in the pool if you like. This early, we’ll be the only ones there. It’s boring alone.”

“When you put it that way…” you admit, hesitating over your last orange slice. Maybe your brilliant plan to disappear forever into the filthiest possible cesspits of the Velvet Court can wait a little bit. It would be nice to be properly cleaned up, first, anyway. “But I don’t have any money.”

“You do, actually. Karkat divvied everything up last night, you’ve got as much right to the spoils as anyone! Pay me back, or don’t, it all works out even in the end. Everyone travels to the Isle in the same charnel boats.”

That’s a bit of a surprise. You don’t think you’ve ever had money. Things have always just either appeared spontaneously or conspicuously not appeared despite your requesting them. You’re not entirely sure what to do with it, beyond the obvious: trade it, on occasion, for things you want. A useful thing to possess, then, certainly. So you don’t exactly have _nothing_ , then. That’s an interesting idea.

“Is there anywhere in the Court that sells books?” you ask, after a second.

“Sure! I’ll show you around on our way, it’s a bit of a walk, and it’s hard to get a gondola, this time of day.”

“I haven’t walked further than the length of the deck in months,” you laugh, a little queasy at the thought, especially on the precarious wooden thoroughfares through buildings and over the canals.

“No worries, neither have I. We’ll just both be hilariously inept. That’s part of the fun of being back on land, though it helps to have Dirk along to lecture you about cardio! He loves lecturing about cardio, and he has so few opportunities to do it under normal circumstances.”

She seems to be expecting a different response than the awkward half-smile you offer her, because her dark eyebrows press together for a moment before she offers you her hand.

“Come on, let’s get going, I don’t like to be underfoot while they’re cleaning up,” she suggests with a small smile to match your own, back to her neutral expression of clear-eyed enthusiasm and mild curiosity.

“So,” you start, following her up the stairs to the attic to begin the trek. “What exactly do they do with bodies, here? I did see the one of them, actually, got taken away in a white boat, apparently to be ‘stripped’?”

It’s very easy, with Aradia, to slip into a pattern where you’re just… talking, kind of normal-like, but not quite. It’s hard not to look at her as sort of your teacher, since she’s definitely been that to you first and foremost, but also because she knows basically everything about everything to do with piracy, and she has a kind of simple way of explaining it, like she’s a transplant, too, and finds it all more anthropologically fascinating than personally relevant.

What’s more, she seems to pick up on the fact that you’re perhaps not exactly facing the morning bright-eyed and bushy-tailed, and happily carries the conversation on her narrow shoulders as you wend your way over the creaking wooden paths.

“First off, great question! Depends on who you call in to deal with them. Once you’ve killed someone, everything they’ve got on them is fair game, unless you’ve been witnessed violating Court law in the process or you do it on private property. If you kill someone in _Starlight’s End_ , for instance, it’s technically the innkeeper who inherits property rights, and also, Kanaya’s likely to haul you in front of the Queen for trial, since that’s one of her rules. Not killing other guests, I mean. But you asked about bodies specifically. Hm. There used to be a tradesman who’d buy corpses if you could manage transport to his shop, made some sick bone knives and accessories - I bought my skulls off him, actually. I think he retired inland, though, which is a shame. I’m not sure what he did with the meat, but he seemed like a practical guy, I doubt it got wasted. Karkat probably called in the Megidos for your deadguy situation, and they usually work for the spoils from the corpses, unless there’s reeeaaally nothing to use, in which case they’ll charge a few crowns. Damara’s kind of a lot, but she’s been a fixture here for as long as I can remember, and if you buy her a drink and sit her down to talk, she’s seen more kinds of dead people than basically anyone. I bet you’d really like her! From what I’ve heard, if they’ve got a next of kin, they’ll just transport and let the relative take care of it, and if they don’t, or if they don’t want the body for some reason, there’s a reef about a mile out where the fish’ll strip a corpse bare in hours. Not a lot of burial opportunities here, obviously, and I don’t think anyone’s gotten around to doing a cremation thing, yet. When we took over the Court a few years back, what with all the dead, we stacked them on makeshift gondolas like cordwood and set ‘em on fire, but doing that regularly would be a waste of wood. It was more of a celebratory thing than a regular cultural tradition. Speaking of culture, though, everyone here comes from somewhere different, so exceptions are the rule!”

It’s nice. Kind of right up your alley, so far as topics go, so it’s pleasant to allocate your attention half to keeping your boots on the most stable-looking boards and half on her words.

“Where are you from, Aradia?” you ask, after a moment.

“I was born in a Dersian port,” she says, pausing to grin in earnest. “Aw, do you want to know my life story?”

“To be honest, I feel a bit of a jackanapes for not knowing it already. It’s strange, I’ll admit, how all of you have become forcibly and circumstantially acquainted with… well, just about everything about me. And each other, as well, I s’pose, after all these years. I am just a little late to the party. Playing catch-up, as it were.”

“True. We don’t get a lot of new crewmates. Takes someone special to make it with us,” she says, nudging you with her shoulder - you yelp, expecting to tumble off the boardwalk, but she catches you by the bicep, and you keep walking like that, arm in arm, grateful for the support if nothing else.

The morning is as chilly as you anticipated, high cirrus clouds painted like streaks of pearly yellow-white across the blue vault of the sky, the air cold and still as the sun rises sluggishly. Only a few people pass below on the canals, and you encounter a small group of children on the walkway, though they hustle past quickly as you budge over. Aradia doesn’t seem worried about it, so you don’t bother worrying, either.

Aradia tells you, with her characteristic neutral-excited quasi-deadpan, about a childhood in a coastal town, making charcoal for ironworkers and blacksmiths with a large family, watching ships go by from a distance. Curiosity, which killed the cat, brought her dangerously close to that fate one night, clambering about on the docks with her older brother. They liked to chat with merchants. She has always had a fondness for storytellers and tall tales.

That was how she wound up in the slaving ship from which Vriska and Terezi liberated her and Sollux. _He’s_ not her brother - she pauses to clarify this - but he might as well be at this point, after being trapped in the hold with her for so long.

“We knew what was going on from the beginning, and we’d heard stories about what would happen if we were taken, by then, so we fought. They beat us both close to death, but he bled out in the hold. We were chained together for days after. But at least he wasn’t alone!” She shrugs, her slight smile not wavering. “I really thought I was going to die there, in the hold of a slaving galleon. It was before I picked up anything in the way of medicine, and one of my legs was - well, had a bone sticking out of it. Which is cool, right? Cool in hindsight. I bound it back together as well as I could, and it’s not like they had us walking around on deck. Didn’t stop me from pulling an oar. Healed funny, but it healed, and I lived, and a few months later we got boarded in the middle of the night, guns flashing, metal on metal, and the door to the hold opens and in walks Vriska. We took over the ship. And it’s been… almost fifteen years? So… there’s my whole deal. Probably zero surprises, but what can I say? Can’t throw a rock in the Court without hitting someone with a tragic origin story. Well-adjusted people don’t make good pirates!”

You frown deeply, having made it through the whole story without interrupting despite the burning question behind your tongue.

“What is charcoal?”

She laughs so hard that you actually have to stop in the middle of the walkway so she can catch her breath. And then she tells you what charcoal is - a kind of efficient burning-things fuel made by cooking the water and residues out of wood - and you have a lot more questions after that, about the way people do things in Derse. You haven’t seen a single steam engine in the Velvet Court, and they’re considered quite uncouth and outdated in Aetria. Are they really still burning things for power, on a broad scale?

Aradia doesn’t know for certain, but seems to think that the answer is ‘yes, duh’. To be fair, you’re not exactly certain how the wind power mechanisms work, either, but you’re fairly certain they are much better in all respects than the way things are done outside of Aetrian purview. Most things are.

You are almost crushed by the intensity with which you miss your home, now.

A home that doesn’t exist anymore.

“...is your leg still mis-set? I hadn’t noticed,” you add, after a few seconds pass in silence.

“It’s not perfect, but I broke it again and set it right once I learned how,” she says brightly. “It wasn’t fair that I didn’t get to enjoy it the first time! Living bones are even cooler than dead ones.”

You wince at the sheer thought.

“I may have to take your word for that.”

“You don’t have to take my word for anything! Never too late to snap an arm or two and see what all the fuss is about.” She snorts, then glances up to see you no doubt blanching quite demonstrably. “Joke! Totally a joke. But seriously, if you want to give it a try, you know who to talk to.”

“Guess all that does explain rather a lot, though,” you add. “Show me a pirate backstory, and I’ll show you a tragic one, nine times of ten. S’pose I just really lucked out on that front.”

She squeezes your arm a little tighter, but doesn’t comment. You have to pass through the attic of the shop where you sold the jewels to Karkat’s godmother the previous day, and reemerging into the sun is an odd shock to your system.

“What was he like?” you ask, blinking in an attempt to clear your head as you step back onto the rickety boards. “Your brother, I mean.”

“I was twelve, so he would have been… maybe thirteen? I barely remember, if I’m being honest. Everything before the Diamond feels like a weird dream. And you’re hardly a person yet when you’re thirteen!” The corner of her mouth twitches briefly as she looks up at you. “I just liked the stories people told on the docks, but he actually wanted to be a sailor. A real one, not a pirate. Few more years and he probably would have joined the Dersian navy, just so he could get out and see the world, ‘nstead of listening to other people’s tales about it. That kind of thirteen year old. I had a big family, though, we just got on the best out of it.”

You nod in agreement, though you have no idea what kind of thirteen year old that is. You didn’t know that many other thirteen year olds when you were that age. Just the _caro supellecta_ who roomed with you, and they didn’t do a lot of talking, about dreams or anything else. Most _litgamella_ begin training rather later than you did, so it was quite some time before you could be housed with others of your sort. When you were thirteen, you mainly wanted to go home.

Jane was always very dutiful, entirely in earnest. No dreams of running off to sea. Wasn’t even an option, really, until rather recently, when mother started gearing up to bring the Aetrian way of life elsewhere in the world.

From what Aradia is saying, you can’t help but think that even with the horrors of war and all, it might be for the better if Janey pulled it off, put an end to all this - where did she say she was from, Derse? - all this Dersian nonsense. What a terrible thing to happen to someone, stolen away brutally from their loved ones, forced violently into servitude and all.

Pirates are not supposed to have an opinion on political matters, you’re pretty sure. Your type of prince isn’t supposed to, either.

But you may not be a pirate anymore, and you’re certainly not a prince or anything else. You obviously can’t go back on the Black Diamond, not once the rest of the crew hears from Dirk how horrible you turned out to be, a thought that twists your stomach brutally. Aradia must not have spoken to him yet, which is the only reason she’s still being so kind to you. Will Karkat even want to give you whatever gold you’re supposed to be afforded by your having participated in the last few months of not-exactly-pirating? It’s okay if he doesn’t, probably, but you’d really like to pay Aradia back, put everything to rights before you disappear. It’s only fair. Perhaps she can take your share.

Aradia halts midway across the canal, and you glance around, trying to figure out why, until she points at a little shop. It’s somewhat newer than some of the others in the immediate vicinity, and appears to be decorated with repurposed ship timber, if you had to guess, painted to a dull black finish not unlike that of the deck of the Black Diamond II.

“Down there, that’s the closest to a book shop we’ve got. Mostly charts and whatnot, but he also keeps manuscripts, and does calligraphy and letter-writing for people who don’t know how, which is a sizable percentage of the Court. Sollux’s dragged me in a few times, and it’s a nice place to spend an afternoon.”

“Ah, thanks for pointing it out! I’d completely forgotten I asked. Are we near your preferred bathhouse, yet?”

“Getting close! You can sort of see it from here.”

She gestures off to a massive, squat building, which occupies the space of at least four typical structures. The architecture is fairly simple, smooth stone whitewashed to a gleaming ivory finish. You pass through the top level of the bookstore, only to encounter the proprietor himself, carrying a massive pile of leatherbound manuscripts with unlikely ease.

He sets it all down upon registering your entrance, and actually takes a knee to bow to Aradia and kiss her hand. You look around nervously, not sure if you should comment on it or otherwise intervene, until she giggles and suggests you might stop by later, patting the musclebound older fellow on the cheek and leading you out.

“Mr. Zahhak is Dersian himself,” she tells you as you continue towards the bathhouse. “He’s fairly harmless.”

“Fairly?”

“ _Totally_ harmless if you don’t mind being fawned over a bit,” she laughs. “I wouldn’t want to wind up on his bad side, though. He was a naval officer - stand around for a few minutes and he’ll tell you the whole thing himself - before the last Queen took his ship, and he defected rather than be killed or disgraced. I could listen to him talk for hours, which seems to confuse him a lot, but I like him just fine, and I could probably get you a discount on just about anything you want!”

“I’ll keep that in mind,” you say.

As you get closer, Aradia directs you to climb down a ramshackle wooden ladder, and you finish the walk, feeling utterly exhausted by the effort, on the cobblestone path along the canal. Luckily, she seems a bit winded, too.

“Cardio,” you suggest, trying not to pant, and when she laughs, she wheezes, which makes you laugh too.

“I won’t tell him if you don’t,” she adds, which sobers you up a great deal. You’re not ready to think about telling Dirk anything, yet. So you just nod vaguely and follow her up to the heavy double-doors of the massive white building.

From this close, you can see that the small windows are stained glass, though it’s hard to make out the patterns from an external perspective. Steam practically plumes out as you help Aradia get the doors open. It’s far warmer on the inside, like walking into a particularly sweltering summer day. Someone has the lights in the sconces of the entrance-room burning, but there’s no attendant, as there was in the last bathhouse you visited, and you glance around in confusion.

“It’s a crown to use the facility,” Aradia explains, seeing your hesitation at the unfamiliar surroundings. She points you to a marble fixture, built into the wall, with a coin slit at the top, and drops four gold coins in. “Pirates’ honor. Seems to work well enough for them!”

There are a few bins, each holding a pile of what look like peculiarly stretchy underwear, and Aradia takes a set from one, directing you to the next one over.

“Swimwear?” you ask, inspecting the fabric curiously.

“Swimwear! It’s a public pool, basically, so you’re expected to be decent.”

“I shall do my best,” you sigh, making a face.

“Alright! You’ve also got to shower first - I’ll point you in the right direction. Oh, and you need soap, right? Hold on, I’ve got some…” She digs around in the pockets of her voluminous skirt, pulling out a little moulded soap in the shape of a purplish flower. Breaking it in half, she hands you a piece, back to smiling.

She starts down a corridor lined with more white marble, the air growing hotter and steamier as the little hallway opens up into a cavernous chamber, the floor, walls, and ceiling all decorated with brilliantly-colored little tiles in geometric patterns, tesselations of hexagons and triangles, swirls of aquamarine blue-green and vivid goldenrod yellow. 

Pillars of marble inside of the building bolster a high ceiling, a massive stained glass window overhead letting in shifting beams of colored light. It’s positioned to specifically illuminate a massive white marble pool, the water of which is also milk-white, saturated with what smell like mineral salts to ease the scent of sulphur. It’s unclear from the entrance how deep it is, but the heat of it is pleasant rather than overwhelming, and the tile, when you stretch out a hand to touch it, is cool.

Your glasses, of course, immediately fog with condensation, and you remove them from the bridge of your nose, allowing them to dangle from their chain around your neck.

This somewhat blurs the colorful effect, but the soft glow gives the place an even more ethereal look.

Aradia seems satisfied by your moderately awed reaction.

“You’ll probably want that shower room,” she suggests, pointing off the the left, where a similarly-tiled corridor leads away. “I’ll be over on the right. Shout if you need anything!”

“Got it,” you say, a little breathless, still, craning your neck up to get a better view of the stained glass artwork, which, with your vision blending together, registers more easily as a portrayal of a massive sea-monster of a whale.

The shower is more marble, not as distractingly grand, and you gratefully take a seat on a white stone bench, only to cringe internally as you recall your last visit to such an establishment, which was under decidedly different circumstances. So much has changed. And somehow, so little. You’re scared of exactly the same things. That you’re out of place, here, and you will be wherever you go. That Dirk may hate you, and that you may deserve it. Different, but not quite different enough for comfort.

You sigh, leaning back against the cool stone wall, and begin to unlace your boots, setting the little cake of soap to your side.

As you do so, a melody begins to echo from the other shower wing of the bathhouse, and you look up in surprise, recognizing it immediately as Aradia’s voice, though you’ve never heard her sing this particular song before. Focusing, you can make out the words to the pleasant melody, and you remain sitting, arrested by its beauty.

[[Tune: Bones in the Ocean]](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WVkD4lgXTEU)

_Oh, I’ve long said farewell to my loves from before_  
_To the family I left on the Dersian shore_  
_I’ve got nothing to seek, nothing more for to care_  
_But a story, a ship, and the wind in my hair_

_Yet the distant lands call, the horizons unseen_  
_Black beaches, high cliffs, and the oceans between_  
_I think of you fondly each time I embark_  
_‘Neath the sun and the sky, lit by firelight’s spark_  
_I’ll see it for you, who fell dead in the dark_

_We had dreams of a place where we’d truly be free_  
_Where the air tasted fresh and the water was sweet_  
_I don’t grieve you at night when I’m rocking to sleep_  
_For I’ve still got that promise I won’t fail to keep_

_And the distant lands call, the horizons unseen_  
_Vast rivers, great forests, the oceans between_  
_I think of you fondly each time I embark_  
_‘Neath the sun and the sky, lit by firelight’s spark_  
_I’ll see it for you, who fell dead in the dark_

_I hope that you’re waiting for me on Death’s Isle_  
_And someday we’ll meet, though it may be a while_  
_I’ll tell you my tales and you’ll welcome me, too_  
_I’ve forgotten your name but I won’t forget you_

_For the distant lands called, the horizons unseen_  
_But it’s only in death that we may reconvene_  
_I think of you fondly each time I embark_  
_‘Neath the sun and the sky, lit by firelight’s spark_  
_I’ll see it for you, who fell dead in the dark_

_I’m not who I was when you bled at my side_  
_I left her behind in the hold where you died_  
_But while likely you’ve long since forgotten my face_  
_I still owe you the oath that I made in those days_

_That I’d travel the seas, to horizons unseen_  
_Remember your stories and share in your dream_  
_I think of you fondly each time I embark_  
_‘Neath the sun and the sky, lit by firelight’s spark_  
_I’ll see it for you, who fell dead in the dark_

_‘Neath the sun and the sky, lit by firelight’s spark_  
_I’ll see it for you, who fell dead in the dark_

Her song falls away to humming and the barely-audible sound of running water in the distance, and you realize that your face is wet, though you haven’t touched the odd shower contraption, yet, and are sitting, clothed, in the shadowy chamber. You drag the back of your hand brusquely across your face and stand to shuck your shirt and trousers off. Aradia has such a lovely voice. And she is probably the best and kindest person that you have ever met.

It would be so sad to never see her again over something so stupid as your own - your own incompetence, the way you somehow manage to pervert every kind of love within reach. It isn’t fair, how everything has to be tied together, how you can’t leave without leaving _everything_.

And you don’t really want to leave, either. You have nowhere to go, nothing else to do. Your life in Aetria all added up to nothing, a punchline, if that. Nothing grand or important or meaningful left over once it was done. And you’re just going to do that again, here? When you’re so close to _something_ that almost feels right?

Maybe not the kind of thing anyone writes stories about, but something worth a song or two, at least.

It’s good to finally wash properly, to lather up under hot water. You’d almost forgotten how good it felt, being completely clean. Having slept a night and addressed that discomfort and exhaustion, food in your stomach, well, now you just feel ridiculous for a different set of reasons.

There’s something _wrong_ with you. It’s nothing to do with Dirk or any of your friends. If you can’t be happy with them, be _normal_ with them, you won’t be able to do it anywhere. Half of you is still living somewhere that doesn’t exist, and won’t be satisfied until you have something that doesn’t exist, either. And they’re real people, real people who you’ve hurt, or will hurt, when they find out - when they believe they’ve done something to wrong you, which they haven’t, they _haven’t_ , they’ve been nothing but good to you, no matter how you’ve searched for something cruel and terrible in them.

You’re going to have to fix this, but you don’t even know where to start.

You want Dirk back. You want him to tell you what to do. But that’s how you’ve been hurting him, using him and his faith in you to hurt yourself. Which he would never want, would never do on purpose, unless you did something really terrible to him, which you have, and even then he keeps _trying_. Over and over again, you’ve done terrible things to him, and for what? _Why_?

So you can’t turn to him, can you. Not if you’re just going to poison him all over again. There are things you could do to punish him for being stupid enough to care about you, and you won’t let yourself do that.

In the end, you don’t bother changing into the funny little swimclothes. You can’t swim, anyway.

But you do head out in your civvy clothes to watch Aradia swim, and there’s no hint of melancholy to it, even after her song and all the things you’ve prompted her to talk about already today. She’s found a way to move on and be a different person. So has Roxy, really. And Dirk. That is a common trait in people you greatly admire, you suppose. It’s just not going to be as easy for you to do the same as you’d hoped.

As she suggested before you left, you roll up your loose-fitting trousers and let your legs dangle into the pool, kicking around a bit and enjoying the warmth.

Aradia looks very like a mermaid, her long black hair wet and loose, swirling around her as she dives and twirls joyfully in the warm pool, steam that smells of dissolved mineral salts wafting up from the slightly cloudy white water.

“Having fun?” she asks, popping her head up above the water’s surface, grinning over at you.

“Well, my glasses have stopped fogging up, finally, so in a sense!” you reply, more cheerfully than you actually feel, but also glad to be talking again.

She dog-paddles over, decidedly less graceful when she’s keeping her face up.

“I won’t be too much longer. Are you sure you don’t want to try swimming? This is the easiest place to learn! Watch this.” With that, she kicks her legs up, and in a second, she’s floating like a starfish on top of the water, still as a corpse in rigor. “See? If you get nervous, you can always just float!”

“I don’t know how to do that, either,” you add, a little softer.

“No worries. Wanted to make sure you weren’t holding out for no reason, I mean… it’s nice, but you don’t have to! I’m just glad you’re here.”

You find a smile for her, and she ceases her floating to smile back, treading water in front of you, no longer quite so mermaidlike. Just your friend Aradia, in the water.

“Thank you. Really, I’m glad to be here as well. Grateful for the distraction.”

“Alright! No problem.” She tips backwards into a dive, sort of, and somersaults beneath the surface for long enough that you start to get a bit nervous on her behalf before she bobs back up to take a breath.

Distantly, you hear the door open, and start for a second. It _is_ a public bathhouse, but you’d been enjoying the privacy of the echoey cavern. Just as good for not-thinking, it turns out, as for thinking.

Aradia climbs out of the pool, wrapping herself up in a towel and disappearing back into the shower room, while you stand around a little awkwardly, trying not to look conspicuous and alone as a few older women enter the bathhouse and eye you up without much interest. You kill a minute or two by getting your socks and boots back on, but you’re well and truly ready to go by the time she returns.

“We should be able to get a gondola,” she suggests, ushering you out into the sun and waving vaguely out onto the canal, eventually hailing a boat, giving them the name of _Starlight’s End_ as you gratefully step in and take a seat.

It was a lot of walking for one morning, anyway. A lot of thinking, too.

She slides in next to you, the warmth of her proximity welcome in the slight chill that still hangs over the canal, especially with your hair wet. She smells nice, too, like lavender, and you put your arm around her shoulders as the man poling you along sets off through the waterways.

From this perspective, and at this time of day, the court looks different. Larger, more imposing, a bit louder and busier. Groups of children chase each other through the streets; merchants push carts and people line up at shops, other gondolas transport heaps of cargo ranging from baskets of fruit to piles of fine fabric to jewels. You zone out rather thoroughly.

Aradia nudges you, distracting you from your thoughts. Thank fuck.

“Jake? Are you okay?”

“How would one know the answer to that?” you ask quietly, not really feeling as though you have the energy to come up with a better-sounding answer. “If you really want to know. If the truth is somehow important, I mean.”

She looks up from where she has her head resting on your shoulder.

“Let me know when you figure it out. Till then, I think it’s fine to guess.”

“I’m… tired,” you say. “And everything is hard.”

“Yeah,” she agrees. “I get it. Do what you have to do! Everybody deals with all this stuff differently. I was just _hollow_ for the longest time, after Vriska and Terezi freed us. Felt like I’d already died down there, or I should have. A few months to figure things out is _nothing_. It took years before I even started coming to terms with… being alive. And I was actually really lucky. Everyone else was dealing with the same thing. It was lonely enough even with everybody in it together. You know we all love you, though, right?”

“I… I do, I think.”

“Good. Because we do. Even Vriska.”

“I actually take great comfort in the fact that Vriska seems to feel no affection towards me whatsoever,” you laugh.

“My mistake, then. She absolutely hates you.”

“Thank fuck! You had me worried, there, for a second.”

“I’d hug you, but you’re so _warm_ and your heartbeat is so _loud_ ,” she says, pouting exaggeratedly. “Are you sure you can’t do anything about that?”

“If there was any reason I was going to throw myself into the canal, my friend, it would surely be to better suit your cuddling preferences.”

“Warn me if you ever feel inclined! I have dibs on your cuffs,” she says, poking your helix piercing with a grin.

Peculiarly enough, coming to that conclusion makes you feel better than just about anything has, so far. She helps you off the gondola when you reach _Starlight’s End_. Though it’s still fairly early in the morning, the sound of conversation and laughter has already started up, and you can smell something delicious, even from the canalside walkway.

“Breakfast?” you suggest.

“I’ll be down in a few minutes,” she says. “I’m going to put my hair back up and bug Sollux till he tells me what the plans are.”

“Lovely. I’ll - I’ll see you around, then. And really, Aradia, thank you.”

“No problem! Thanks for being my escort this morning.”

She practically skips up the stairs, once you make it inside, though you take a moment to adjust, again, to being around people. Whatever is being prepared for breakfast smells like eggs and sugar and cinnamon, and you just stand there, for a moment, taking it all in.

Kanaya is wiping down the bar as one of the young serving-girls carries an armful of plates out from some hidden kitchen, heaping with toast and syrup and sliced fruit. She seems to notice you as you notice her, and smiles invitingly, positioning herself in front of an empty stool

You do your best to ignore the rest of the tavern, the small gatherings of breakfast-goers and the few people milling about, and sit down, taking a deep breath.

“I need your help,” you say, the words spilling out jumbled and all at once, your voice low. “I need somewhere to stay, and a job. I’ll do whatever you need. I just need - something different, I think. I can’t keep doing what I’m doing, or I’m - I’m going to - I don’t know what I’m going to do. But I need your help to stop doing it, whatever it is. Please.”

She sets the piece of rag with which she is scrubbing down the polished-wood bar down to her side.

“Did you have a trade, before?” she asks simply.

You start to say that it’s a complicated story, but that you’re willing to tell it to her, if she’d like. That you did a lot of things, really, that you were second in line to a throne she’s never heard of, but she will, in time. That you can serve, that you’re as good a jeweler and metalworker as anyone, that you picked up sewing and fishing and a little cooking on the ship, that any of your crew will vouch for your ability to work hard at a task, if you’re so inclined.

But the words don’t come. You swallow around your dry throat.

“I was a prostitute.”

She nods acknowledgement, her expression betraying no surprise whatsoever, as she extends her hand to take yours. Your breath hitches, now, with the effort of having - having said it. And you brace for something terrible, though you’re not even remotely sure what you expect.

“You’ll be welcome here, Jake,” she says, her voice warm and gentle. “As long as you need.”

You look up into her eyes, maybe a shade or two brighter than yours, now that you can see better, with light flooding into the tavern, searching for something that will tell you what to say or do next. She doesn't immediately react, and you get the acute sense that she is scrutinizing your expression just as surely as you are hers.

It is something of a stalemate, until the heavy door of the tavern swings open abruptly.

"Maryam, I've had it up to fuckin' _here_ with your bullshit," a cold, clear voice announces. "Can't fuckin' krill you, but on any God but the one you're shacked up with, today's the day I give it a try."

Her expression hardens remarkably quickly, and you stumble back from the counter as she draws the sword you quite recently watched her use to slice a man in half and _vaults_ over it, weapon at the ready.

" _Eridan Ampora_ ," she spits, as you turn to watch the door close behind the finely-dressed man who is currently pointing a harpoon gun at your best hope to figure any of this out. "You live each second by my grace, and my patience, I'm afraid, is running thin."


	7. Turn the Tide (or, English Opening)

Kanaya stares coldly down the barrel of a harpoon gun, the wicked-sharp tip of its projectile barely a meter from an unwavering, level aim between her eyes.

This is definitely not ideal. You were hoping to get this whole thing over with and sorted out before anyone came downstairs, before anyone tried to talk you out of or into anything else. Out of your hands and into her no doubt capable grasp, for all she is currently occupied with a sword and a murder-in-potentia. While you’re not totally sure what you’re afraid of, the urgency is very real. You _need_ to have something to tell Dirk, some proof that you’re handling this, or _someone_ is, that he doesn’t actually need to worry, you can set yourself to rights on your own, and even if everyone does hate you, now, even if Aradia steps into the communal sleeping space and immediately learns from him what a cowardly, perfidious piece of garbage you are, you have this, now, a _strategy_ , and… it’s okay.

Of course, cowering behind a barstool is not where you were planning to end up, and you know very well the consequences of being run through by that _particular_ hand-cannon, and you haven’t really figured anything out, terms and plans and - you just need something concrete, something to point to, some kind of evidence that you can change. Given enough time, you can fix your damn self. Isn’t that what Aradia said? Time, you just need time.

And who better to furnish that than the woman baring her teeth with a total lack of observable trepidation at a man poised to blow her head clean off her shoulders.

Situated next to Terezi, who is quite small of stature, Eridan appeared to be rather tall and imposing, the first few times you encountered him. Perhaps you’ve simply gained perspective, or perhaps the fact of the matter is that most anyone pales in comparison to Kanaya, who, in her heeled boots, has a few inches on you and more on him.

“You really don’t fuckin’ think, do you,” he snarls, regardless. “No love lost ‘tween me an’ Cronus, _obviously_ , so thanks for that, really doin’ me a solid, prob’ly a week maximum before the fucker’d have tried to off me, but did you, maybe, perch-ance, think to stop an’ give it a little consideration, the kinda _fundamental_ question of _what the shit another Ampora’d actually be doin’ here?_ ”

“I did briefly wonder how my deterrence method of choice with regard to your kin, vis-a-vis ‘darkening my doorstep, ever’, had fallen short in such a critical respect, but was somewhat busy with the pressing matter of his impending murder of my dear friend Karkat Vantas.”

“Shit,” Eridan sighs, lowering his gun just a fraction of a centimeter. “He musta lost his fuckin’ mind.”

“I do seem to recall issuing a similar edict regarding your presence on the grounds of _Starlight’s End_ , if you can possibly recollect the terms of our agreement?” she adds frostily.

“C’mon, Kan, swear to fuck -”

“It was quite simple. You do not show your face within my establishment, and it remains attached to your shoulders.”

“Well, what the fuck d’you expect me to do! A guy gets kinda confused, what with the amicable detente we shore as hell seemed to have goin’, when the Megidos drop a stripped-bare corpse on my doorstep without so much as a heads up.”

“His head was no longer up, rather abruptly. I apologize for the inconvenience.”

“That ain’t the half of the inconvenience. _Stripped bare_ , I said, those _vultures_ halfway across the Court by the time I figured out what was goin’ on. And what with the raven ‘rezi got this morning, you got any fuckin’ clue what you’ve done?”

“I imagine that you will enlighten me.”

“His token! He’d have to have been carryin’ Dualscar’s sign, to make it here through the Dersian shippin’ route. Or he _was_ , ‘fore they melted it down for a _thousandth_ of its value in gold, ‘cause some high an’ mighty _innkeeper_ with an oversize pigsticker who wouldn’t know the difference ‘tween a crown an’ a _motherfuckin’ royal merchant’s seal of safe passage_ got it into her head to cut him up like a hundred eighty pounds of the world’s most _rancid_ sashimi,” Eridan fumes, the barrel of his gun dipping even lower as he runs a hand, heavy with rings, through his hair.

At very least, he has exemplary taste in accessories, you’ll give him that.

The corner of Kanaya’s mouth tugs upward, slightly, at this news, but she remains impassive.

“Oh, dear. And were you hoping to return to the family estate, then?”

“Well, yeah, as a matter of fact, I was! ‘Cause it turns out, apparently there’s somefin’ to return _to_ , not that you’d know if I didn’t _graciously_ come runnin’ down to share the news, with the only person who’s gonna appreciate what this actually means, what with your sociopathic vendetta.”

“And to kill me.”

“Don’t push me on that, I’m still considerin’ it,” he says bitterly, though he looks away for a second, fishing a piece of parchment from the inside of his finely-brocaded purple tailcoat. “Here.”

He shoves the paper in her general direction, the muzzle of the gun now pointing more to her chest as she lowers her sword to accept it. It’s a bit weathered, but clearly printed on high-quality stationary, a broken purple wax crest showing even from where you are… no longer cowering, mostly just sitting back on your haunches.

As you climb carefully to your feet, getting the sense that the danger has passed, his gaze flickers over to you. Which makes sense, as the tavern has emptied out remarkably quickly, and you’re the only other person in the immediate vicinity. His eyebrows rise upwards over his glasses in recognition.

“You’ve _reely_ been holdin’ out on me, Maryam. Harborin’ our runaway prince, not thinkin’ to inform the Queen?” he observes, shifting his attention back to her.

“Not a prince, or anything much, at the moment!” you protest, confused by the idea that anyone would give a damn about your whereabouts. “And, er, not technically being harbored by anyone, actually!”

This is not the right thing to say. Now he is pointing the harpoon gun at you, with an expression more of intrigue than malice, but if he were to shoot you with that thing, unlike the previous occasion when he ran you through, you would die. And it would hurt just as terribly, and ruin your shirt _just_ like last time, and you don’t have _any_ other clothing, yet. You freeze in place, and Kanaya drops the letter and raises her sword.

“Ampora,” she says warningly. “This young man has only recently come into my care, but he is under my protection, regardless. It is hardly my business what Terezi chooses to share with you. You will lower your weapon, or turn it back to me, if it makes you feel better.”

“This is stupid,” he grumbles, and shoots her through the stomach.

The speargun fires with a quiet but distinctive sound, a clank and a wheeze of compressed air. The sound of flesh tearing is also a familiar one, and you flinch and stumble back as Kanaya is thrown against the counter by the force of the point-blank projectile and her sword clatters to the floor.

It passes through her cleanly, but makes impact behind the bar, shattering several bottles of lower-shelf spirits. Hot blood splashes your shirt, and most of the immediate surroundings.

Eridan sighs and checks his watch. A second passes that feels like a year, as you gape at Kanaya’s body.

Before your eyes, the skin of her stomach knits over the gruesome wound, though it heals (back?) into a gnarled black scar, and her eyes flutter open. Not especially angry, but alight with annoyance. She glances down at the freshly-ripped hole below the bodice of her gown, and up at you, seemingly to assess your reaction.

You were expecting something different, based on Aradia’s description of her relationship with the Sea King and what you’ve seen so far of that in practice - the bread, the wave. But no, the harpoon was not arrested before it made contact with her body, the blood was not pulled back inside of her by some temporal whosiewhatsit. She is just immortal, you suppose.

To be fair, you weren’t even really expecting that sort of shenanigan. When you see someone get shot with a massive spear-shaped projectile, you typically expect them to _die_ , and rather more slowly and painfully than all that. It reminds you somewhat of your own experience of the Star King’s power in your body, how you _could_ still die, and in fact, did so somewhat more rapidly than struck you as typical, in order to more expediently repair the damage, but…

“This was among my favorite dresses,” she says frostily, turning back to Eridan. “I shall address the invoice of damages incurred to the Queen.”

“Worth it,” he retorts.

“And I will not be returning your harpoon.”

“Got extras.”

“Would it surprise you to learn that I do not care?”

“Not ‘specially.”

“I am glad that we seem to be on the same page. If you have no further violence to attempt to inflict, I have a few questions that I would like answered before I kill you where you stand.”

“Figured you would,” he says. “Some letter, huh?”

“Some letter,” she agrees reluctantly, kneeling to retrieve the now blood-spattered piece of parchment, inspecting it again. “I take it that you can verify this signature? It’s been some time since I laid eyes on -”

Any further attempt at conversation is interrupted by several people rushing down the stairs, probably in response to the recent sound of several bottles shattering dramatically and a body hitting the floor.

“What the fuck did I miss?” Vriska demands, sword _and_ gold-washed hook at the ready. From the slight lurch to her gait and the dark circles that show even with the backdrop of her deep complexion, it is somewhat likely that she is hungover. The smell of spilt alcohol is overwhelming enough to tip her off, even if the massive spear sticking out of the wall isn’t. “Shit, not the booze!”

“Miss Serket,” Kanaya begins, with a sigh, as the rest of the Black Diamond II’s crew filters down the stairs. “I’m afraid that the situation is more complicated than it appears -”

“Hey, do you want me to kill this guy for you, Maryam? ‘Cause he fucking sucks, and I’ll totally kill this guy for you!” she continues blithely.

“Are we killing Ampora?” Sollux asks. “Fuckin’ finally.”

“I’ve had enough of that dude!” Nepeta agrees, with evident excitement, clearing the last six stairs in a single leap to join in on the proceedings. “I vote ‘murder’!”

Equius nods gravely in agreement, cracking his knuckles rather menacingly, though Feferi begins to argue immediately in Eridan’s favor, and Eridan himself tosses his now-empty gun aside and pulls back his purple tailcoat to reveal a truly wicked array of knives.

“ _No one is voting_ ,” Kanaya says, through gritted teeth, barely audible over the rising din. “This is not a democracy. Serket. I will thank you to _control your crew_.”

“Are you _suuuuuuuure_ you don’t want me to ki -”

“Everybody shut the hell up! Only person you motherfuckers are killing right now is me, I swear to fuck, my head -” Dirk hollers over the muddle of voices, gesturing at Kanaya, though he stops when he locks eyes with you.

For a split second, you freeze all over again, not sure where to look. Oh, this is exactly what you were hoping to avoid. Because you don’t know what to say to him, yet, you haven’t figured out how you’re going to… what you’re going to do, and it would be just _cruel_ to leave things as they are, right? Him having laid your whole putrid soul bare all over again. You having tried to hurt him back, and almost certainly succeeded. Because he’s whole, more a person than you, more difficult to break, of course, but you’ve become all too familiar with the soft places in him, where he can still be hurt, and you’ll...

You will do it again. The second you don’t have an answer to his questions, the second you lack the means to reassure him or convince him or… you’ll hurt him.

Like usual, he knows exactly what everyone should be doing, but instead of looking to him for further instruction, you turn back to Kanaya as the crew’s arguments briefly fade.

“Thank you, Mr. Strider,” she says curtly. “If you’ll all be seated, I may yet have need of your services this morning. Breakfast will be brought out shortly. In the mean time, I will take a moment to discuss some recent developments of interest with a subset of the present company. Do wait around until I am finished, and please refrain from any further escalation, violent or otherwise, in my establishment.”

“Am I part of the subset?” Vriska asks.

“No. Jake. Eridan. Please follow me.”

She does not phrase it like a question. You follow her behind the bar, Eridan reluctantly tailing the both of you as you do, and you don’t look back.

One set of double doors seems to lead to a kitchen, based on the sounds and the smells emanating from inside of it, but she ushers you past and into a small corner office. It’s tidy, with a shelf of books, a stack of charts organized with little colorful tabs spread across a desk, and an assortment of paintings decorating the walls. One small window overlooks the harbor.

Kanaya sighs and slumps in her desk chair, gesturing indicatively at a loveseat tucked against one wall. It is a small miracle of body positioning that the both of you manage to fit, entirely without touching each other.

“Must you be so utterly objectionable?” she says, atop an aggrieved exhale, frowning at Eridan.

“Yeah, probably,” he replies.

You raise your hand tentatively, as though in a classroom lesson.

“That’s not necessary,” Kanaya says. “You may speak at your leisure.”

“Oh, uh, good,” you say, glancing shiftily at Eridan, then back at her. “So, if I may ask. Erm. What is going on? I am somewhat… confused? By everything that is happening, has happened, and may happen in the near future?”

“I see,” she says, placing her hand over the torn place in her gown. “I possess the heart of a King. This invests the bearer with a level of divine -”

“No, I get that part,” you say hastily. “I have also done that, sort of, you don’t really need to explain! It was a whole thing that I was and have been doing, as of the last time we met. Last-last time. Somewhat more forcibly than I imagine you have done, or, well, who’s to say, I’m hardly in any position to cast aspersions on your methods…”

Her eyebrows, delicately raised, take on the likeness of a pair of raven’s wings, extended before flight. At her cool regard, you stutter to a halt mid-explanation.

“I _see_ ,” she repeats.

“I gave her back,” you add, chagrinned.

“That was you.”

“Presumably, the person you are thinking of was me, yes.”

“Yeah, yeah, _I_ already knew that part, can we get back to the important shit?” Eridan interrupts. “Not that I’m anyfin short of _fascinated_ by more English-related exposition, but I’ve heard enough about him to fill a reel stupid book.”

She tilts her head slightly, as though she is carefully slotting puzzle pieces into place, then turns to face him more directly, flicking open the letter.

“Dualscar lives,” she says simply.

“That’s the impression. It’s his signature, sea-n it half a million times on old documents. Else it’s a hell of a forgery, but what’d be the point of fakin’ it?”

“Let’s assume, for the moment, that I trust you, on this limited scale of reference.”

“Figured, honestly. S’my ticket outta gettin’ filleted, Kan. You need my help. An’ I could use yours.”

“That remains to be seen,” she says quietly. “Please explain the rest of the letter, then, and the presence of your cousin in the court, as you understand these matters to be connected. I will pass judgment after you have shown yourself to be helpful.” 

“Alright, for the uninitiated in the room - Eridan Ampora, of the Dersian Amporas. Close to royalty as ya get without a crown, for the record. Few decades out from gettin’ disowned over a total misunderstandin’. Got our own way of doin’ things, or did, ‘fore someone got it into her head that she’d wipe the whole line off the face a’ the planet.”

“Explain the letter,” Kanaya says, again, more sharply.

“So, keepin’ in mind that most’a us are dead, and you ain’t likely to come across merchant ships flyin’ violet these days -”

“ _Slaving_ ships,” she corrects him.

“Slaving ships,” he concedes. “Gotta make a fortune somehow.”

“I would argue that many people live their entire lives without taking human beings as chattel -”

“Who’s tellin’ this story, huh? _I_ never enslaved anybody, for the record. Got m’self burned off the family tree a little early for that. C’mon, you’re the one who brought English back, he doesn’t know shit about shit, lemme fill him in. I’ve met him before, y’know. Anyway. Basically a dead house, but a noble one. ‘Least I figured it was dead. Hadn’t gotten word from a relative in years. Dualscar ‘specially. Dropped off the map around the time I was born, never even met the guy. He’d be about a hundred, if he was alive, which I guess he is.”

“Seventy-six,” Kanaya corrects him.

“An’ how the fuck would you know that?”

“We are the same age.”

Eridan sighs, rather dramatically. “Just my fuckin’ luck. More fucked up history. I don’t give a shit, so don’t tell me. Anyway. Cronus, who’s a bitch, just to get a last dunk in on the dead fucker, shows up, and from what I’ve heard, he was lookin’ for Aetrian shit. Ain’t any kind of surprise, asshole never had the aesthetic sensibilities the Gods gave a rattail grenadier. But then this letter comes. Can’t exactly _check_ , on account of the ass-naked corpse I got handed to me, but I figure it’s the same one he must’a gotten hold of, why he had such a hardon for your stupid cultural shit. Asked around a bit, an’ it’s the same story with a few merchants, too. Dualscar’s throwin’ his lot in with the Aetrian invaders, an’ he’s lookin’ to sell the story with some home decor updates an’ whatever the fuck. Dunno what they promised him in return, but he’s emptyin’ out his coffers for anyone who’ll sell him so much as a damp shoelace with an Aetrian story attached to it.”

Kanaya nods along with his story, occasionally glancing down at the parchment as though to verify what she is hearing. None of this makes terrific sense to you, but you try to nod at appropriate intervals as well.

“Hold on,” you finally say. “Jane’s in Derse? Already?”

“The letter does not reference that name specifically,” Kanaya notes. “Only that an Aetrian envoy arrived at the Ampora Estate within the past week or so prior to the raven’s being sent to the Court. Would you expect her to be mentioned?”

“Well, yes, given she’s the - the new Empress, and all,” you say. “But that makes sense. She’d send faster ships ahead to ease the process of invasion, to conduct reconaissance and prepare for the arrival of her troops. Potential allies and sympathizers within the population, such as a deposed merchant or whatever the hell, especially one with property to share, would be a good place to start. I’d imagine that she would prefer to land with the main body of the army, once the basic infrastructure was already put together. Though it’s been some time since I gave that sort of matter any serious thought, heh.”

“Property’s all we got left, ‘cept the title. It’d make sense. The Dead King’s been talkin’ ‘rezi’s ear off, keepin’ her up to date on the Aetrian bullshit,” Eridan suggests. “Haven’t heard fuckall from him ‘boat anyfin else. Can’t say he’s a fan of you guys, English.”

You try not to blanch. Kanaya doesn’t seem to notice.

“The Dead King’s Sight was inadequate to offer me any illumination as to Dualscar’s whereabouts,” she replies. “He led me to think him dead of his wounds decades ago. As though he had simply _disappeared_. He would not have died a pirate, after all. But we have no reason to rely further on his perspicacity if he was incorrect on this point.”

“So, uh,” you say, breaking the silence that descends. “What exactly did you need me for, then?”

“If Dualscar lives, I will be leaving posthaste with the intention of remedying this situation.”

“Oh.” You deflate slightly. “Then I s’pose you can’t very well… I was really… hoping, I mean, that you’d be able to take me on, as you’d suggested…”

“And I’ll need a crew, and a ruse to enter the estate and gauge his strength. _If_ he lives. Regardless, it seems that my initial estimation was correct. We have been presented with an opportunity. _Someone_ wishes to procure Aetrian goods, substantial quantities of which your shipmates are currently storing in my attic. And who better to open the door for me than an Aetrian prince?”

“ _Great_ thinkin’,” Eridan interrupts, before you can formulate a response. “Till the Dersian navy boards ya an’ blows your ass outta the water before you get within fifty nautical miles of the shore. Even Vris ain’t stupid enough to leave the Diamond Line without a means of securin’ safe passage, which, I’ll remind ya, woulda been an option if you’d just -”

As he speaks, Kanaya opens the soft leather pouch around her belt where you saw her tuck the necklace from the would-be murderer’s corpse.

Up close, it’s a large square of pure gold, bright yellow and soft-edged, set with glassy purple stones in the shape of two cresting waves.

“I am not as stupid as you seem to believe,” Kanaya says shortly, holding the pendant aloft.

Eridan falls silent.

You raise your hand again to get her attention, completely forgetting that she told you not to do that until she frowns at you. Gingerly, you allow your palm to fall back to your lap.

“So, ah, am I to understand that you will be gearing up for a mission, of sorts, then?”

“Yes.”

“And I am invited along?”

“You would serve as the cornerstone of the plan, Jake, if you’re willing to accompany me.”

“And you wish to involve the crew of the Black Diamond.”

“Some portion, yes. I have a decently-sized catboat in my possession that I would prefer to use, smaller and quicker than your ship. To accomodate cargo stored upstairs onboard, she would have to be sparsely crewed, but ideally I would be working with familiar faces. The opportunity for plunder will be substantial; I doubt that Vriska will refuse.”

“Oh.”

“Is that amenable to you?”

“I…” you pause, not totally sure what you intended to say upon opening your mouth to speak.

The problem is, you didn’t really have a plan, going into this situation. You were hoping that Kanaya would have a plan. That she had sized you up already and thought to herself, ‘ah, yes, here’s an utter trainwreck of a man, luckily I have seen this exact situation before many times, and am a God’s chosen, and frightfully perceptive to match, and I enjoy fixing broken people for fun and profit, or else I would not offer to try’. And then you would… do what she told you to do.

She is not currently telling you to do anything. She is _asking_.

You sigh.

“I don’t know. I’ll have to… talk to them. And hear more of the plan, if you’re willing to share it. And… I’d really like a proper breakfast, also, I don’t think such decisions ought to be made on a mostly-empty stomach. And I don’t want to muddle into something… complicated, I don’t do very well with complicated things, and… that’s all, I suppose.”

She nods, as though this is about as much as she could have hoped for. That sinks your stomach. In for a penny, in for a pound, you suppose. This _is_ what she wants of you, however much or little she truly does understand of your situation.

“You’ve surely picked up on the fact that this is an endeavor of great personal significance,” she notes. “You would be well rewarded for your successful part in it.”

That perks you up a bit, and she smiles in recognition.

“If you wish for a ship of your own, that is within my power. On the other hand, a vacancy has recently opened up within the Court, what with Mituna’s death. If you wish to apprentice yourself to a trade, you would be well within your rights, as part of my debt to you for your assistance, to request a shop from which to operate and in which you could reside.” Her lip tugs up, revealing a fraction of a canine tooth. “And my betrothed might well be convinced to grant a formal audience to one willing to aid me so honorably.”

While you were already fairly sold on doing anything she wanted, this certainly sweetens the deal a bit. You’re sorting through options at a mile a minute, wide-eyed at the sheer thought of it. A _formal audience_ sure does sound like the first step to acquiring eternal life and youth and all that.

Quite fortuitous, really. Just about everything you could have asked for. All at once.

“Take your time -” she begins.

“I’ll do it.”

“If you wish to consult with your crew first, you’d be welcome to hold off. It will take at least three days to supply and prepare for the journey.”

It’s a small room, but there’s enough space for you to sweep grandly off the couch, only elbowing Eridan in the face once in the process, dipping into a flourishing bow. A proper one, not one of the weirdly-staid versions that everyone outside of Aetria does. You sink to a knee before her, one wrist gracefully extended.

You can do this.

“It would be my honor and privilege to accompany you on your journey, Miss Maryam,” you declare. “I meant to pledge myself to your service this morning, and this endeavor is no exception.”

She pauses, regarding you cautiously. Before she can stare at you for too long, you find your feet again, smiling as winningly as you can manage. This really is a turn of luck, isn’t it? Vriska whomst? You have this entire situation under control. Dirk will never forgive you for your subterfuge, surely, that much is quite clear, but you think even he will be quite impressed by how you’ve swung this.

Kanaya looks like she might have something to say, the slight furrow between her brows deepening into visibility, but Eridan interrupts before she can.

“Hold on, what do _I_ get outta all this?” he demands. “I literally brought this to you, Kan, c’mon. Have a heart. You gotta admit, that was pretty good, what I just did. You’re reely too proud to tell me that was _good_? Mending intergenerational trauma, huh? That shoal’d count for somefin!”

“You will leave the grounds of my tavern alive, after spilling blood on the premises,” she says, her tone suddenly cold as ice. “Or have you already forgotten that part?”

He sighs, leaning back onto the loveseat and spreading out, easier to do now that he’s alone on the piece of furniture.

“Fuck you,” he says, without much conviction.

“I think not,” she retorts. “That was not a statement in the future tense, Ampora, it was a command. You will leave. If I have further need of your counsel, I will contact the Queen.”

He stands and shoulders past you, the gold epaulettes of his tailcoat digging into your chest as you try to budge over and make room. Oh, well. You haven’t made a habit of befriending people who have murdered you before thus far, and you don’t intend to start now.

With the two of you alone in the back room, though, Kanaya slumps against her desk, as though a string holding her up from the ceiling has been cut.

“You don’t need to stay with me,” she says softly. “Your room will be clean, if you would prefer privacy, and breakfast is ready. I simply need a moment to regroup before I address your crew.”

“If you’ll pardon my saying so,” you reply, “if there are… entanglements to this, I’d like to be aware of them, going in. As I understand it, we’re planning to murder a dastardly old slaver and rob him blind, and I’m all for that, but, er, if there’s more to the story…”

“There is more to every story than can be told in a lifetime,” she says.

“Ha, yes, that’s certainly true, but perhaps you could share a few of the cliffsnotes?”

“I will answer that question with a rhetorical one, which I’m sure will delight you,” she says, a sardonic edge to her tone. “You introduced yourself as a prostitute. I knew that to be a highly reductive oversimplification from offset, though the more we interact, the more I recognize the substantial _scale_ of the omission. Why?”

You cough, already having mostly forgotten about that. It wasn’t your best moment, probably, though as you think about it - you’re pretty sure it was a defensible position to take!

“Suppose I knew you knew, and I wanted to see what you’d do!” you suggest, infusing your tone with faux-brightness.

“This is what I am doing. Go on.”

Toying with your rings, you try to come up with anything resembling a satisfactory answer. How much _do_ you want to tell her? How much do you actually know the truth for yourself?

“It…” you drop off, a bit stilted, clearing your throat. “My whole… deal, I mean. It only seems to upset people and make it more difficult for… for my crew to… I don’t think I can fix my whole thing if I’m all knotted up in the past so thoroughly. Which I am. I… it has been very, very difficult, I think, to stop… being that. I don’t know how and I keep blundering it. I was hoping you could help me. That I could just… leave it where it belongs. And then everything would be okay. I tried facing it head-on, you understand! I tried to just… deal with it, build on top of it, and all that did was…”

You sigh, gesturing off towards the main body of the tavern. Where Dirk, along with the rest of your crew waits.

“That was a lie too,” you add. “That I could reconcile it all and just be something else with it still being a piece of me. I need it gone. It’ll keep poisoning me and everyone else, how I was, then, how - you don’t, you _can’t_ understand how terrible I was, how much I hurt him, all of them. I need to cut it out of me.”

“I see,” she says.

“Do you? Because I’m not sure I do,” you say.

That makes her smile sadly.

“You’re very young,” she observes, which is awfully rich, coming from someone who, by every appearance, is roughly your age. You’d guess her at twenty-five, if you didn’t know the truth. The weariness in her tone, though, rings sincere. “You will have time to figure it out. I will see to it.”

Oh _yes_ , you sure haven’t forgotten that. Not one bit. Imagine how much you could fix yourself with an eternity to bumble around and figure it out! You’d really just have to figure out how to get Dirk included in the deal, from there, and then in a century or so, when you’re the kind of person who - you’re getting ahead of yourself. You’re also smiling a touch too enthusiastically again, and you tamp that down right quick.

“Alright! Well, that’s my whole deal, then, there is no further ground to cover, really, it sounds as though you’ve got me all figured out!” you say gratefully. “At least, as much as a half-finished baked good can be assessed while still in the oven or whatever the fuck.”

“We will continue to discuss this at intervals,” she corrects you wryly. “I will not allow this matter to distract me from my underlying objective, to aid all those who have been victimized by men such as this one.”

“Speaking of which,” you parry, feeling quite like yourself - no, better! A better version of yourself! - and deciding to push a little bit. “I’m not the only person who’s leaving something out in their depiction of the situation, am I? Won’t you fill me in as to the vendetta at work, here? I love a good story.”

“Incorrigible,” she observes. “Would it surprise you to learn that there is a song to answer your question?”

“Nothing would surprise me less,” you reply, leaning against the wood-paneled wall, smiling invitingly and nodding as though to say, implicitly, ‘go on and sing me your life story’.

She snorts. “I don’t sing. And I do not have to. Come with me.”

You comply with a shrug, following her back out of the room and into the main floor of the tavern. Roxy has joined the crew, wearing some sort of apron - was she in the kitchens? - helping Dirk to polish off a plate of french toast, a sight that has your stomach twisting just a little bit, though it’s good, really, that he has people other than you. It’s _good_. Really really really.

“Would someone be so good as to get us started on ‘Turn the Tide’?” Kanaya calls, almost conversationally.

Roxy looks up, delighted by all appearances. “Oh, hell yeah! Acapella cover, let’s fuckin’ roll, help me out, Karkey baby!”

“I hate you, and everyone,” Karkat growls. “I’ll hang myself with my own vocalhose before I sing at eleven in the morning. The Gods themselves aren’t awake.”

“Aradia!” she continues, nonplussed. “Pick a key!”

Willingly, Aradia hums a note - you’re still not good enough to figure it out by just the sound, but Roxy picks it up immediately, seguing into the opening lyrics of a song with great gusto. Kanaya, standing beside you, smiles.

[[Tune: The Rising of the Moon]](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JxfTZjNJxxw)

_In the low forgotten cellars, in the towers up on high_  
_Every woman to another in the night was heard to sigh_  
_Porrim Maryam has freed herself, she waits for us dockside_  
_Oh my sisters, rise and join her, for it’s time we turned the tide_

_And they whispered to each other, where the meeting was to be_  
_On a ship she’d named the Chrysalis, bound out for open sea_  
_There waits safety, there waits freedom, no more masters to abide_  
_Let each caged person hear it, that tonight we turn the tide_

_For tonight we turn the tide, for tonight we turn the tide_  
_The unchained must stand together if we mean to turn the tide_

_Once the torches burnt to embers and the halls were dark and clear_  
_The full moon’s light meant the signal and they made out for the pier_  
_From the kitchens to the prisons to the bedchambers inside_  
_Not a one was left to rot there as they rose to turn the tide_

_For tonight we turn the tide, for tonight we turn the tide_  
_A new life we’ll make as equals once we finally turn the tide_

_And aboard her shining galleon crewed by those who knew the trade_  
_Nigh a hundred fifty captives hoist their anchor, sailed away_  
_O’er the bodies of the captors wives and children mourned and cried_  
_In their wake trailed blood and fire on the night they turned the tide_

_For tonight we turn the tide, for tonight we turn the tide_  
_They made pyres of their prisons on the night they turned the tide_

_Though they claimed their freedom nobly and stole out across the waves_  
_Those they left alive pursued and cut them down to early graves_  
_For a few small acts of mercy all but one among them died_  
_And the Chrysalis was scuppered, and their lifeblood stained the tide_

_Yet despite their heavy shackles, bodies drifted in the foam_  
_As the Sea King held her sisters up, then gently brought them home_  
_Porrim Maryam’s young daughter clung to flotsam and survived_  
_But they’ll surely wish she didn’t when she one day turns the tide_

_For we’ll one day turn the tide, for we’ll one day turn the tide_  
_If we follow in their footsteps we will someday turn the tide_

_For we’ll one day turn the tide, for we’ll one day turn the tide_  
_The unchained must stand together if we mean to turn the tide_

_For we’ll one day turn the tide, for we’ll one day turn the tide_  
_A new life we’ll make as equals once we finally turn the tide_

By now, other guests have filtered back into the tavern, and it’s a full chorus by the end. You try not to stare at Dirk at all; that proves impossible, and you settle for doing it furtively, and not quite the entire time. Kanaya watches you pretend not to be watching him, nodding slightly in time to the song.

A cheer goes up as they finish. Someone from another crew has what looks like a weird circular guitar device, and begins to pluck out a new tune as a segue. Roxy blows Kanaya a kiss - she smiles in earnest, tapping her cheek as though to accept it.

“All songs are propaganda for one concept or another, but this has a measure of truth to it. I was born on the Ampora Estate,” she says quietly, speaking quickly but clearly enough to hear over the rising sounds of music. Not quite looking you in the eyes. Back to staring into the middle distance. “My mother had been captured from the ship of a Prospitian royal. She thought to escape, once I was old enough to safely accompany her. This proved complicated, but she was a uniquely compelling and capable woman. We were betrayed in the process of leaving the estate. Many of those who’d been… more gently treated, in some respects, though certainly more brutally in others… were reluctant to kill those who had been their patrons."

She pauses, as though at the memory of it.

"Survivors of the revolt gave chase. They caught us within the week. That part is true. Dualscar led the hunt, as my mother had slain his father, the lord of the estate. He gutted her as I watched. Threw her body overboard like _garbage_. She was a strategist, not a fighter, she could not have - she had no chance against him. I thought he meant to do the same to me, or worse, and in a sense, he did. But he left me alive, after, to die slowly, to think on what I was to him. And I most surely did. The ocean carried me to the Court as our ship went under, where we’d been bound. In time, I recovered. I swore, then, to slaughter every member of his house, to wipe the stain of them from the earth, to heal what they have blighted for so long. The Ampora line will die with our friend Eridan. I have seen to it.”

Now _that_ is a satisfying and complete origin story if you’ve ever heard one!

“That puts everything into perspective!” you say, nodding along. “The Sea King, then, she rescued you - oh, that’s awfully romantic, and you pledged yourself to her, and together you righted the wrongs that had been done!”

She snorts. It’s a surprising noise from such a staid and formal woman as her.

“I don’t doubt that she preserved my life that day, but it would be years before we met. I understand that she was curious _what I would do_ , given the gift of survival. And, well. I was single-minded in my pursuit of revenge. There was no time for Gods or Kings. I regret, sincerely, much of how I conducted myself. It was needlessly brutal. Inelegant. Time has treated my story kindly, but in the moment, much of what was done was nothing to be proud of.”

“Oh. Do they… _know_ , that it’s you, in that song?” you ask. “And of your… I mean, of the Sea King’s having chosen you?”

“It is something of an open secret. Few give much thought to the woman behind the bar, so long as the ale flows cold.”

“Huh,” you say. “I - I think I get it, then. I can’t say I’ve got much experience with the whole revenge-seeking business, I’ve never… well, certainly I’ve never been compelled towards anything of the sort. All the ridiculousness I’ve wound up embroiled in, I mean, it’s been of my own choosing. I hope you know that. My - Dirk, he didn’t - he wasn’t keeping me captive against my will, he did nothing to harm me in the slightest, even though I tried to murder him several times! I… I really don’t want you thinking ill of him, that he or anyone has treated me as you were treated just because of a few ropes. A little bondage between friends, I mean, what’s the problem, really? That-all sounds far more… egregious. And I’m very glad you’ve put an end to the whole slaving thing, what an embarrassing cultural more for these kingdoms to have upheld for so long.”

“It is far from eliminated,” she says, after a moment’s pause. “Though few have even tried to take up the mantle left behind by the Amporas. It is far more disorganized, more difficult to entirely extinguish.”

You notice, of course, that she ignores most of what you just said. Oh well, you tried.

“I’ve dedicated my life to repairing the damage they’ve done, to few more than to the inhabitants of the Velvet Court, so many of whom shed shackles on their journey to its shores,” she continues. “I have failed to kill Dualscar twice, now. I will not fail again. He will die by my hand. That much is all I ask of you in this endeavor. I will be the one to kill him.”

“Well, I certainly wasn’t planning on making any overtures to the contrary!” you chip in. “I s’pose that all makes great sense. I’ve never done a revenge-piracy type thing before, and I’m excited to help!”

A ghost of a smile passes across her face, disappearing quickly into something contemplative, distant, as though she sees something out the window, over the horizon, that you can’t make out. She executes some kind of tonal shift that you can’t quite put your finger on, and suddenly it’s very much as though you are leaned over some map or another, watching Jane and mother talk of war.

“Your strategic part will be rather simple, despite the pivotal nature of your presence. The Ampora Estate is devastatingly well-fortified; it must be opened from within. To lay siege is no use. The supplies within would outlast those that can be acquired from the countryside or maintained on even a fleet of ships. You will be playing yourself. The prince, if there was any doubt to that. If what is written in this letter is true, he will gladly welcome you into the harbor. If he does not… then we will have learned something about his intentions. I put nothing past him that I would not put past myself.”

Despite her tone, she still wears that same almost dreamy expression, reminiscent, sad. Her brow knits together and she shakes her head, as though to clear the fog of recollection from it.

“At most, I will require you to serve as a distraction,” she adds. “I know the estate as well as I know the Court. Your part will be to ply him with drink and feasting and song, as best you can. I will determine how he managed to evade the Dead King’s sight, and then I will kill him. Mine will be the last face he sees as he dies.”

“Sounds spiffing!” you say agreeably. “Now, ah, I don’t suppose you have insight on - I mean. You know my, er, _trade_ , should I… should I expect him to be receptive to a little charm and elbow grease?”

“He is well into his seventies, if he lives, as I said.”

“You’d be surprised how little age matters, so long as they’re not _dead_ ,” you say. “All I’m asking is, well, if his tastes run towards the…”

You gesture vaguely at yourself.

“I would not ask that of you,” she says shortly.

“Oh, of course not!” you reply airily. “ _Never_. I just mean, if the fellow’s really as horrible as all that, if we wind up in a pickle of some sort, might be useful to have an extra tool on the belt, a backup on which to fall!”

“That is an eventuality I hope to avoid entirely,” she tells you, then hesitates, meeting your eyes. It really is a bit funny, how similar they are to yours, like looking into an odd kind of mirror. She searches for something, either in your gaze or simply in your expression, breaking eye contact after a long second, glancing down and to the side. “But yes. He would find you quite amenable.”

“Roger that! See, this is getting better and better, entirely my wheelhouse, y’understand,” you say, trying not to actually sound too excited, failing completely. “You’ve asked the right person for help, you can be sure, you won’t regret having done so!”

“I regret all of this,” she tells you flatly. “That is why I need to finish it.”

“How right you are,” you agree, settling your tone into something a little less ebullient with some effort. “Okay, if it’s all the same to you, I might just take a moment to… well, think on all this a little bit, figure out what I’ll need to do to slip back into the role convincingly!”

“Please do. Think about it, I mean. This is - I am asking quite a lot of you.”

“Less than you think,” you assure her. “See, I don’t have the baggage most of you lot have with this kind of business.”

“Regardless. I don’t enjoy requesting that you take up a mantle that you have described as ‘poisonous’.”

“Oh, pish posh, people act out that kind of thing all the time, to cope! Trust me, I’d know, as a well-trained practitioner when it comes to dealing with people taking out that sort of… stuff… on a neutral party, in a low-stakes and cushy environment, it really does help, turning it into a scene or a mask. Makes it small enough to swallow, I think. Hell, for all I know, this’ll be massively therapeutic! After all, my mother did recently pass away rather unexpectedly, I’m sure any peculiarity you’re picking up from me has to do with that. It helps, it must help, to partition it. To make a tool of it, to serve the greater good!”

“We will speak on this further,” she says levelly, though she’s far less present than you’ve ever seen her, no incisive stare or burdensome inquiry into what you’ve just spouted. “Would you prefer to speak with your crew, or ought I to -”

You’re feeling tremendously emboldened by all of this. It is kind of incredible, how quickly Kanaya has gotten you back to feeling like a person again! She has one hell of a talent at this business, that’s for certain! You turn back to the table where the crew of the Black Diamond II is singing, laughing, and day-drinking. If nothing else, you have this to offer them. A grand quest, gold and glory and revenge. That will be enough to make up for it.

“I’ll float the idea,” you suggest. “You’re, ah, looking a little green, there?”

“Thank you,” she says. “Don’t worry about it, Jake. I will simply need to change my dress, to take a moment to myself and all. But I will return to discuss logistics, once you’ve ascertained interest.”

Glancing down, the employees of the tavern have already cleaned up any evidence of the shattered bottles, the blood on the bar, the harpoon in the wall. You are, as a matter of fact, more bloody yourself than the place where she died briefly. Incredible.

“No, really, thank _you_ ,” you reply emotively, grinning in earnest, now, turning back to the table, your soul feeling positively buoyant at what is to come.


	8. Closer to the Harbor (or, just talk to them, holy shit)

“So!” you announce, spreading your arms demonstratively as you stand at the head of the table. “Excellent news!”

 _Starlight's End_ remains relatively uncrowded, the quiet thrum of conversation around you conferring both a level of privacy and a totally surmountable background noise when it comes to spirited delivery of your latest pitch. Kanaya has disappeared somewhere, leaving you to handle this, and handle this you most certainly will.

You clear your throat, smiling in anticipation.

“Miss Kanaya has generously offered some subset of our present company, particularly including myself, the chance to help her with a revenge mission, served several-decades-chilled, with a delightful opportunity for looting and pillaging and all that a-la-carte. I don’t know if you’re all familiar with the Dualscar fellow of the Ampora family, but he’s apparently alive and on the hunt for Aetrian goods in advance of my dear sister’s invasion, so I’m going to dress up as myself and distract him a little bit, as something of an expert in the subject matter, of course, a ‘Trojan prince’, as it were, while she sorts out how he’s been evading the notice of the Kings for so long, and then she will murder him brutally and we will steal everything that isn’t nailed down, and ideally some of the nicer things that are! Anyway, there’re sure to be a few spots on the voyage, so I’m opening up the floor for discussion. She hopes to work with some of you, as I said, given your familiarity.”

“ _Hells_ yeah!” Roxy replies, grinning as she processes some of that deluge of words. “You got us a job, Jakey!”

“I sure did!” you agree. “With a big payday and all expected, I should add! Apparently the fellow is rather wealthy, if the sums he’s offering for Aetrian trinkets and somesuch are to be believed. And quite richly deserving of murder, too.”

“Didn’t he die like half a century ago?” Karkat contends, hesitating slightly.

“Yes, there’s the rub! But dead men rarely send letters all signed and sealed and soliciting fancy accoutrements at high prices, and the good Mister Eridan confirmed that the signature and penhand was his own, so this will be as much a factfinding mission as anything.”

“Any figure on the payoff?” Sollux asks, crossing his arms and raising an eyebrow.

“Nope, not set with any level of certainty. But the site we’ll be looting is the Ampora Estate, if that means anything to you, and Miss Kanaya’s got some kind of special talisman she took off a dead fellow that’ll get us there.”

“Excellent!” Aradia chimes in. “How many slots open? I’ve always wanted to see the Ampora Estate, they’re one of the oldest Dersian families, I bet they’ve got loads of culturally fascinating treasure bundled up in there!”

“You’d want to use the leftover loot we’re storing in the attic,” Vriska observes, frowning. “Little presumptuous, isn’t it?”

“Well, sure, but…”

“Don’t look so scared, English, I’m in! I’m so in for this, holy shit. Just thinking logistics.”

“That’d be a first,” Karkat sighs.

“Aw, fuck off, Vantas, let me character-develop in peace.”

“So we’re all in accordance, then?” you say excitedly, rocking on your heels in unrestrained enthusiasm.

“Hold the fuck up,” Dirk interjects. “She wants you doing _what_?”

“Oh, you know,” you reply breezily, not really looking at him. “Rub elbows with the fellow, keep him busy with the wining and the dining and the Aetrian intro-level language learning if he’s so inclined while she cases the joint! Awfully close to my wheelhouse, wouldn’t you say?”

“That wouldn’t be my first reaction, no,” he says, crossing his arms. “Uh, d’you want to think about that for a second? Like, how long has this plan been in the oven, dude? ‘Cause Kanaya just hurried off like she’d seen a ghost, and I’m a little spooked myself.”

“You don’t have to come along if you don’t like it,” you say shortly, feeling unaccountably irritated by his _questioning_ you on this. “It’s a perfectly sound plan, I actually have some training as a tactician, you know, I sat in with Jane for the first few -”

“That’s not the training I’m worrying about,” he retorts, and you flush crimson at the thought. “And what the fuck, you think I’m not coming with you? While you cosplay the person you hated being so much that you literally abandoned your wholeass homeland -”

“I didn’t hate it!” you snap. “When did I _ever_ say I hated it?”

Possibly a few times, but, well, you were wrong, because you didn’t, not at all. Perhaps you hated not having someone like Dirk in your life, sure, true enough, but you don’t have him anyway! He’s made his decision, and now he wants to walk back on it, act as though he can tell you what you should be doing, when he’s already made it abundantly clear that he hates you and wants nothing to do with you, ever?

“I don’t want to do this here,” he says quietly, after a long pause, in which it becomes rather conspicuous that the whole table is silent.

“Then let’s not! Let’s not do this. Take a moment to talk it out amongst yourselves, I’m going to take a walk. If you won’t help, I’ll find someone who will. Do let me know once you’ve reached an accord.”

With that, you turn on your heel and make for the door. Someone - not him - calls after you, but you don’t bother so much as looking back.

It burns at you like acid, how he would - how he’d say that, any of that. Sure, it’s probably fair, _sure_ , you’ve hurt him enough that you most certainly deserve the worst of what he could do to you and more, but - but - it’s just not right, that he’s punishing you for _trying_ , now, you’re trying, really, haven’t you proved that?

Does he think any of this is fake, then? That you’re just - lying to the crew? That you’re that yellow-bellied and dishonest and repulsive? Of course he does, but it hurts so much to _know_ rather than to merely assume.

You leave _Starlight’s End_ without any idea of where you’re going, following cobblestone paths and canalside walkways, climbing rickety ladders when you reach the end of any particular block and using the overhead thoroughfares. You just want to get away, you _have_ to get away from this, as far as you can, somewhere you can… think. Or not think. Not-thinking sounds a lot better, doesn’t it.

After a few minutes, you find yourself at the docks where you’ve landed twice, now, in the Black Diamond and her successor. It’s the work of a few more minutes to wander down the network of docks until you find her, moored near the end of a pier.

What a mess. What an utter mess. How is it that every time you try to fix things, you only make them worse?

 _What the hell is wrong with you_ , you demand, trying to turn your mind’s eye to face internally, as though you could see it, the blackened, cancerous patch of rot that makes you like this, that must have been there all along. It must have.

You’ve always figured there was something wrong with you, after all, some reason it was Janey, not you, who mother liked. She must have had a reason, even when you were younger and hadn’t had a chance to spoil yourself yet. So there was always something there, something she could see even when you couldn’t, that always winds up being revealed eventually.

If only you’d ever managed to sit her down and have a real conversation with her.

She could have explained it for you, maybe, if she weren’t dead. You wish Jane hadn’t made the crew leave so quickly. There was no time to clean her skull, or you would have done so and brought it with you, and maybe that would have helped. You always wondered what it would look like, what it might reveal about her that she never would have shared with you deliberately, not when you always made it a waste of time, talking to you, never understanding as you should have.

You would think it was just the way of the world, being confusing and opaque and just utterly impossible to parse, full of secret rules and expectations to dodge and leap up to meet, but no one else has ever seemed to have such a hard time with it as you. Jane got it. She was able to do it. You didn’t, and couldn’t, and now you’re _here_ , at the end of a moldering dock in a foreign land, thinking in a language that isn’t even your mother tongue, owning nothing but the clothes on your back and the boots on your feet.

The dock creaks and sways under you.

It’s too overwhelming to cry about. Too large and much. So you stare at the calm waters of the harbor, shucking off your boots and socks, and having a sit-down when it gets too tiring, keeping yourself upright. Thinking that you must look the utter _picture_ of pallid misery. At least you’re not falling short of those aspirations. For now, you haven’t yet let yourself get too ugly.

When you swish your legs in the murky water, you don’t have to see your reflection at all, so you do. And you sit, and you slip effortlessly from thinking into not-thinking.

Seagulls wheel and dive overhead, acting out their own feathery psychodramas as you watch two vy for the same position on the rigging of a smaller ship moored a few places down. Massive strands of kelp float in the dark waters, bobbing slightly on the currents. Tiny silvery fish dart about between pilings, beneath the keels of the ships creaking in the tide.

It’s all the same ocean, but so different, at the same time. For all you know, the water rippling around your ankles is the same as that you used to stare out at from your bedroom window, from the same waves that rocked the galleon in which you stowed away, the stream to which you would walk Best Part of Waking Up or Midnight Rendezvous when they seemed thirsty on the trails, the crystal-clear water pouring down through the massive pink marble fountain in the courtyard.

All the same, does that mean something?

Might as well stop trying to get things to mean other things. All it means is what it is. The water _is_ cold, dark, translucent, a comforting distraction. You are more or less at peace, alone with something to occupy your time. You wish you weren’t alone. It was so nice to be with Aradia, when you were feeling all listless and not yourself. Now it is you and the fish and the seagulls.

“Oh shit.”

You recognize that oath, and look up quickly to see Dirk climbing down from the Black Diamond II, landing with catlike grace on the unsteady dock, the impact sending ripples through the still water, jostling you slightly.

“What are you doing?” you ask.

“Not following you,” he says, a little hastily. “Just… figured you’d want your stuff from the Diamond. Karkat mentioned you hadn’t stopped back to get it, so…”

He waves at the ship, then down at himself, as though to say ‘see, explanation!’. In his doing so, you realize that he has your pack over his shoulder. Ah. So that’s all, then.

Your stomach twists in on itself, regardless, and your face feels hot and flushed.

“Thanks,” you sort of mumble. “You… figured correctly. I just didn’t know how to, I mean, retrieve it myself.”

“No problem,” he says.

The air seems to thicken for a long moment, as he looks not-quite-at-you and you look not-quite-at-him, and nobody moves.

“Can I join you?”

“Oh, ah, sure,” you say, scootching over slightly and patting the dock, which is in and of itself enough to make the timbers creak. It’s still easy, just reflecting his energy back at him, regardless of what it is. You’ve been doing it for so long, playing mirror to whoever you love most, you’ve gotten good at it. Now you don’t quite know how to stop.

“There’s no easy way to say this. Uh. I’m worried about you. And I’m sorry if I was like - if I made you feel like I was anything outside of that. My emotional range right now is basically ‘tired’ and ‘worried’. So. I don’t know if that’s… useful context, but that’s where I’m coming from.”

“Psh. Of course. You would never - I could never think ill of you,” you say quickly. “It’s quite fine. I’m sure it’s my fault. Just needed a moment to clear my head, ha, now I’m very cleared up and fresh as a daisy and you could probably just lead me home and we could mostly forget about the whole business!”

He raises one eyebrow, maximum-skepticism.

“Dude, you’re… are you doing that on purpose?”

“Doing what?” you reply, a touch frantically. “What is it that I’m doing?”

“Give me a second.”

You are only too happy to clam right the hell up as he sits beside you, keeping his legs up as he slides off his sandals and cuffs his pants, but otherwise just a few inches to your left.

“I love you,” he says. “I’m worried about this… quest, adventure, whatever. It’s not that I don’t trust Kanaya to look after you, and you to look after yourself, but it’s really… soon, and also I’m sorta not sure on the trusting front, when I think about it for more than a second. She can be single-minded when it comes to what she wants. That’s fuckin’ great when it comes to wiping out a lineage of shitty slavers, but… I don’t want to see you made into someone else’s surrogate for machinations that don’t even matter to you.”

“They matter very much to me!” you protest, back to feeling warm and tight, like bile is rising in your throat.

“Sure. Okay. That doesn’t mean it’s not absurdly quick turnaround from the last thing we did.”

“I don’t want to dwell on my own past for a moment longer than I have to,” you insist, crossing your arms protectively over your chest. “It’s pointless. I’d really rather not get into it, Dirk, not when it so clearly makes you… I mean, you and everyone, I can _tell_ how much it unsettles you all, who and what I’ve been.”

“Am I making this worse?” he asks suddenly. “I don’t have a fucking clue what I’m doing, here. Give me a hint.”

“No,” you say. “Not worse.”

And you lay your face against his shoulder, so he knows you’re not fucking with him. Because you’re not, honestly. You’re tired. It feels like it’s been a week since you woke up this morning, a year since you said those horrible things to him, and now you just would really like to nuzzle up against his sleeve and have him hold you, and you’re not even sure why. Everything is going quite swimmingly, except for this _one_ piece of things, his worry about you or his frustration with you or both or neither or whatever the hell is going on!

“Okay,” he says, exhaling. “Good. Thanks. Fuck. It’s just hard. Because I really… want to see you… happy, y’know?”

“You do say that an awful lot,” you concede, and he sighs again.

For a while, the only sound to pass between you is the watery swish of your ankles in the harbor. An otter, a few meters away, twirls about on the surface for a few minutes before diving out of sight with a full-body undulation.

“Why do you want to do this whole fuckin’ revenge-quest?” Dirk finally asks. “What about this… help me understand why this is even a little bit important to you.”

“Well, you know me, I’m a sucker for a well-executed tragic backstory!” you say reflexively, and he _winces_ at your tone, and you have to pause and hide your face for a moment as you try to… say it right. Slowly, you lift your head back up. “I think I like the idea because… well… I’d be helping her, wouldn’t I? For once, all my bullshit, everything that makes you all treat me like I’m some kind of delicate porcelain teacup in need of babying and makes _me_ feel like some kind of high-yield chemical explosive waiting to tear the face off the nearest person foolhardy enough to handle me… it’d be an asset to draw on rather than a damn albatross hanging around my neck. And wouldn’t that be good, to take the - the thing that’s clearly not working, and turn it into something that works?”

“Do you seriously think this is going to help, though? It’s been, like, three months. The wound hasn’t even scabbed over.”

“What wound?” you argue. “Really, what damn wound? I haven’t _been_ wounded, Dirk, if anything, I _am_ the fucking wound, so far as I can parse it out! You can’t really expect me to just fundamentally alter my entire self, on my own, when you seem to like it so much? I thought…”

“I’m sorry,” he starts, “if I -”

“No, you’re not! You’ve got no business being sorry! You liked it, how I was on the trip back to the Court, didn’t you? Didn’t you like that? Or were you lying, every time you said you did?”

“Fucking hell, Jake, how could I not like literally anything you do? _Literally_ anything, you could fucking skin me and I’d just be making googoo eyes at your technique as long as you seemed _happy_!”

“Well, I was! I was happy. I… I thought I was doing very well! And then you had to go and act like you’d done me some great disservice, by giving me something to live up to, like you didn’t _want_ it, like I’d done something so terrible to you by trying to be what you wanted of me, and - and - and maybe you’re right, but it’s not fair, Dirk! It’s not even remotely _fair_ , there is not a smidgen of justice to it, I feel that I’ve hurt you terribly and I don’t even know how or why and it makes me want to hurl myself out of the top floor of _Starlight’s_ fucking _End_ , alright?”

“I don’t know how to tell you how much that scares me,” he says quietly.

“I know,” you reply. “I know, I know, I know, and I don’t _want_ that, I _hate_ hurting you! You - you want to know what I want, Dirk? I want you to carry me back to your quarters on the Diamond. I want you to kiss me senseless. I want to stay in there with you forever, for nothing to matter but the two of us. I want to never think about any of this again. _That’s_ what I want.”

Suddenly, he’s crushing you to his chest in an embrace that feels almost desperate. Uncomfortably tight, pressing you against him - your glasses must be really digging into his chest, but he doesn’t let up for a second, buries his face in your hair and just breathes.

“It’s your room too,” he says, barely audible, something sad and heavy in his tone.

“Is it?” you say. “Because I’m not the first mate. It’s not my ship. It’s not even really my crew. It’s your family, it’s your life, and I… have loved being included in it. That much is entirely true. But you understand, right? That nothing in this fucking world is mine. Nothing but you. And I am so scared, all the time, that you are going to see me the way you did last night and realize, as you should have months ago, that I am much more trouble to keep than I am worth. I _have_ to account for that, because you aren’t stupid, dear heart, you are so much smarter than I am, and I… I… obviously I can’t fool you forever, can I?”

Your words come out muffled by the fabric of his shirt, and you try to twist away, to say it to his face, but he only holds you tighter.

“Dirk, I -”

“Please stop talking,” he murmurs. “I swear to fuck, Jake, you say shit like that and it makes me want to slaughter everyone who’s ever laid a fucking hand on you.”

“Well, that would keep you busy for a few years,” you protest weakly.

He doesn’t laugh. You didn’t really expect him to.

“I love you,” he says. “I don’t say it enough. I love you. You don’t… have to understand what I mean by that, I mean, just that I _do_ , I love you so much that it hurts, it _aches_ , every second I’m not holding you, held by you, with you, fucking hell, Jake, it burns. I love you.”

With no small amount of embarrassment, you still remember the first time he said that. How unequipped you were to hear it, then, how terrified you were of the words. You still are. You’re shaking like a fucking leaf in his arms, you can’t just let him _say_ things like this.

He lets you pull away, shuddering as much from the cold as anything, probably, straightening your glasses and looking anywhere but at him.

Suck in one breath, then another, you pull it the fuck together. You _have_ to stop shaking.

“I believe,” you say haltingly, “that you believe that.”

You turn away before you can really see his face fall, but you can’t seem to stop the words, or even pause long enough to filter them anymore.

“You - you hate it when you think I’m performing for you. I know you do, you can’t tell me you don’t, _I can tell_. It makes you sick. It would’ve made you sick, you wouldn’t have liked it if you knew. I know. _I know_. I always know. That’s what makes it so cruel, that I did it anyway. But everything you’ve ever told me you love about me, all of that, it’s… it’s all tied up, Dirk, don’t you get it? It’s all one song and dance or another! I don’t know how you can be so terribly sharp and not… get it, until I slip up like I did. There is nothing inside of me. I’m a seething pit of _nothing_ , I need someone to tell me what to do and be and want, and you’re right, it doesn’t have to be… I can choose who that is, that’s as well as I can do for myself. But I will always be performing _something_ , and I will always be _disgusting_ to you, because it’s the truth, it’s all fake, just as it’s been with everyone and everything else. It’s worse, though, because you really believe it, that you love me. But _I_ don’t exist. I don’t fucking exist.”

Before you can get any further - you’re not really certain where you’d go from there, but you’re quite sure there’d be more - tears overtake you and you have to bundle yourself up, tucking your knees under your chin, to keep from falling off the edge of the dock with how violently your whole body is trembling.

You don’t want this. You don’t want to think about it, but you just said it, didn’t you? And now he knows, which is good, he knows all the things you were certain he should’ve figured out last night, because they were all out in the open, and somehow he _didn’t_.

At least he doesn’t try to touch you, because you don’t think you could bear it.

He sits, legs dangling over the water, and he watches you cry. Luckily your knees shield you from his expression.

“I’m sorry,” you choke, around sobs. “I’m really - I think I’m really sorry.”

“You didn’t do anything wrong,” he says softly.

“Don’t lie to me. I don’t want it. There’s enough of a tangle of lies coming from my end of things, I really don’t think I can sustain any more.”

“Jake, I’m the one who should be sorry here.”

“That’s a load of hogwash if I’ve ever heard it,” you insist, your fervency muffled slightly by your knees. “You’ve been nothing but nice to me and I just - I just twist it all around and make it something _evil_ , I can’t take unearned kindness, that’s the long and short of it. I can’t take it from you anymore.”

“...what would _earned_ kindness look like?”

You wave your hand about vaguely. “When I’ve done something good, and you say ‘that was good’, you know? It’s not too terribly hard to parse out, I should think.”

“And what if I think it’s a fuckin’ heroic feat, the best thing I ever saw, every time you blink?”

For a second, you almost laugh, it almost breaks the syrupy tension enveloping you, but you shake it away.

“Then I’d have to say you’re more stupid than I ever took you for.”

You release your grip on your knees, your fit of panicked sobbing mostly passed, and lay back on the rickety dock, feeling it shift with the current beneath you, the slightest of shorebound waves lapping at the aging hodgepodge of old wood. While you are probably contracting eighteen different kinds of tetanus, you cannot quite bring yourself to care, and you stare determinedly up at the cold blue sky.

He’s still watching you, and you’re still pretending that he isn’t, or that you haven’t noticed, or that you somehow don’t care, or something. You’re pretending something, like you always are. Maybe not when you blink, but that is just an autonomous physical reaction, and if he could be so dense as to love you for something like that, it is hardly your problem.

“I don’t think it’s gonna help to try to map it out for you,” he says, after a second.

“You have more than once already. I remember,” you say. “I haven’t changed since. And don’t - don’t just tell me some silly list of moments, alright? There’s nothing easier than orchestrating a nice romantic happenstance. And not unique to you, either. I don’t think you understand even slightly what my occupation was. I have always dealt in fantasies. Any _litgamella_ could and would have done the same, were you their sole patron, or even if you weren’t, really. You must understand, it’s not even remotely all about over-exaggerated noises and posing and such! If one is good at it, I mean, and I… I really was good at it, Dirk. I was the best there was.”

There’s a long silence.

“Which isn’t to say that you are… a patron,” you add. “Though it would be rather easier if you were, I think. I would understand that.”

“You don’t want me to change your mind.”

“I don’t want you sticking your neck out on my account when all I’ve ever done in return is cut your throat,” you retort. “This is the kindest thing I can do.”

“Gods fucking help me, I don’t want you to _protect me_ , when the fuck did we lose track of the big scary pirate thing?”

At that, you’re forced to crack kind of a half smile, but you quickly tamp it right down.

“You don’t scare me anymore.”

“What if I got a new tattoo? I’m thinkin’ a chest piece, it’ll just say ‘communication’ in fancy letters.”

Against your better judgement, you huff a bit of a tear-choked laugh.

“That would be terrifying, I’ll concede.”

“Underneath, an icicle hitch. Enough to strike fear into the heart of the saltiest fucker in the Court.”

You laugh again in earnest, putting your hand over your face in an effort to - you don’t know exactly what, but it isn’t right, feeling like this, whatever you’re feeling, in the midst of such an important conversation. It being so very vital that you make him see things your way.

It’s just hard to balance all that out with how it warms you, radiating out from your heart, when he just… talks with you, like everything is fine and normal, even though it’s _not_ , it’s categorically _not_ , you have to fix this!

“If I can’t stop you from sailing off to impersonate someone you’re not anymore, I’m coming with you,” he continues, when you struggle to find the right words to respond and shoot him a helpless look.

“Well, you _can’t_ stop me,” you argue. “I mean, you most certainly could. But I don’t want you to. I want to do this.”

“You think this is going to… do anything other than put you back in a shitty rut, feeling horrible about yourself? That’s what I’m flipping out about, bro. I know you can handle the job. S’only fair that I recognize that. You’ve been doing really well, Gods’ honest truth. I’m worried that it’s going to make shit worse for you, in the end, slipping back into that… space.”

“It’s not slipping if it’s on purpose,” you argue.

“I know. I just, you’ve been considering this for what, half an hour? Humor me, talk me through it, what’re you getting out of someone else’s revenge mission _right now_?”

“I think it’s going to help in the very same way you’re so convinced it’ll hurt, as a matter of fact,” you say. “Because it’s something I can do with all of that _past_ , something right, truly and earnestly and unquestionably _right_. To exorcise it. It’s not something I can use, or even really think about without troubling you and the rest of the crew, you know? And once it’s over, I’ll be closer to something I could believe you might actually love. I’ll… I’ll have a little shop, here, in the Court, and perhaps I’ll start doing proper cremations and making jewelry. I had an idea about the otoliths in fish heads, that I might make earrings of them, they’re very pretty and so often wasted. And I could buy bodies and learn to make knives and whatnot of bone, Aradia tells me there’s a need for that. I’d wager I could do pretty brisk business in such a capacity. I’ll solicit the aid of the Sea King and find a way to gain mastery of time itself, to buy myself enough of it to fix this mess between my ears. I’ll get better, Dirk. I just have to get this… piece of myself, as it were, under control.”

“This is going to sound insane,” he says slowly, “but you know you can do all of that without going on this quest, right?”

“Not all of it. I can keep painting over the tear in the canvas, but it’ll still be torn underneath. Even if… what, you all chip in to help me buy a shop instead, which, first of all, I’ve no interest in your charity, second of all… I get comfortable with things as they are somewhat perilously easily, and if I don’t do this now, with this lifeline I’ve been thrown, I don’t know if I ever will. And I don’t need handholding and cosseting, alright? I’ve had enough of that to last me a few decades, I quite think!”

“...have you?”

“Clearly!” you exclaim. “You’ve said it yourself! Not a callous or a muscle on me, never worked a day in my damn life before I met you, really, Dirk, I’m not having this argument. And we’re - we’re getting off track, you’re getting me off track.”

“Sorry. Go on.”

You’ve lost a little of your fervency, and a lot of your proximity-to-bursting-back-into-tears, and you gnaw at your lip for a moment, phenomenally put out by the whole thing.

“I know I’ve got some things to work on. A lot of things. And I think Kanaya can help me, and I can help her. If I’m to be anything worth _actually_ loving, the least I can do is to work on myself. Figure it out without making you a casualty of the process. That’s the only reason I wouldn’t want you along with me.”

“You’re already what I actually love. Everything I actually love.”

You laugh harshly. “Were you listening to a damned thing I said?”

“Always, morning star.”

“Did you forget, then, that you -” your voice tics up, colored by hurt and indignation, now, because perhaps you’ve found the root of it. “- that you just about walked out on me last night, did you _forget_ what I said? I’m not going to… it isn’t just that I can’t do that to you, though I _can’t_. I can’t stand your disappointment, either. When I try and it doesn’t work.”

He hunches forward slightly, and you can feel his gaze leave you, in the periphery of your vision. You exhale, gulp a fresh breath, try to adjust back to a facsimile of normalcy and composure while he is distracted with his own musings.

“I didn’t want to say something stupid,” he finally says. “I think by that point I already had, though. I’m not… upset at you, or disappointed, or… anything. It’s not _you_ I was frustrated with. Any more than I’d be frustrated with Vriska for her deal. I know where it comes from, when she snaps at me or tries to murder me or whatever the hell. I know - as much as I can, which I know isn’t even remotely complete - I _know_ where this is coming from with you. I just didn’t… get it, I think. I let wanting you to be okay get in the way of actually… helping you be okay. And I’m sorry for that. I should’ve known better. So of course I feel guilty about that. Doesn’t mean I love you any less, or - or want you any less, to be crystal-fuckin’-clear, even though I don’t know how that’s gonna work now, since I can’t… I’d die before I did anything to hurt you, Jake, and if it’s hurting you…”

“Heaven’s sake, can you stop going on about that? I _told_ you, I like having sex with you,” you say vaguely.

“Maybe I’m selfish. Maybe I don’t want to do anything that’ll make you doubt for a fucking second that I love you. Even if you like it, and I _obviously_ like it, because I’m the horny piece of shit, here, it is me. Does that make sense?”

“I don’t - it’s complicated,” you say, because it is. It’s complicated, alright? Because you want him, even here, even with your heart shoved in your throat, even fighting the twin impulses to push him away and devour him. You want him. You want to feel _good_ , and he makes you feel good, and making him moan and unravel, it’s not just the thing you do best, it’s - it’s the best thing.

“Can you try to explain it? Zero stakes. You won’t hurt my feelings. Straight-up can’t make me love you less. It’s not possible at this point.”

You exhale, long and low.

“It goes in a box,” you say, after a moment, gesturing up at the sky. “It’s just a different box than… love. That’s all. They don’t touch. Different things entirely. It gets weird, when the boundaries blur, but there _are_ boundaries. It takes negotiation between boxes, sorting through minutiae, really paying attention to it, to do… lovemaking, to make it how I know you prefer it.”

Dirk lays back beside you, though he leaves a few centimeters of space between your hands. The proximity, after so long, feels almost electric, and you draw away from the spectre of it.

“As long as we can talk about it, I’m okay,” he says quietly.

“Well, if you’re so adamant about coming along to the Ampora Estate, then I s’pose we’ll be up to our ears in opportunities to… talk about things.” You try not to blanch at the thought. This whole conversation already feels like something has been crawling about inside of your ribcage, after all, some great fluttery winged insect brushing uncomfortably at your heart and lungs.

He reaches over and takes your hand in his. It feels different than it used to, now that your palm is scarred and calloused, not quite yet a match for his own, but getting closer. The rough pad of his thumb swipes over the still-soft skin of your knuckles. It should be soothing. It almost is.

Regardless, you shift closer and lean your head against his shoulder. The movement shifts the floating dock, but you ignore that, focusing instead on the way he feels, to center yourself in something familiar.

“What are you going to ask the Sea King for?” he asks, and you hear it reverberate through his body as much as by way of the cool air eddying around you.

“What else is there to ask her for? More time,” you say.

“Yeah,” he says, picking up your hand and holding it over his chest. “S’what I’d ask for, too.”

As you watch, easier to accomplish from this angle, a very large starfish that’s taken up residence on the hull of the Black Diamond II slowly moves over the black-stained wood of the keel, only visible through the still but murky water because it is a remarkably bright orangey red color.

“So… what do we do?” you ask, when it finally crawls out of view.

“Three or four days to kill before a grand adventure. When you’re ready to head back, let’s figure out our crew, get a schedule from Kanaya, start making it happen. That what you had in mind?”

Sort of. You nudge a little closer to him.

“Will you stay with me, in my room?”

He hesitates. “If you want me to.”

“Of course I want you, Dirk. I always want you. Even when I’m - I’m - you know, _always_.”

“That’s not what I mean. Like, actually, do you think it’ll help to have me there? Will it make it easier to talk, or will it feel like inertia, back to normal? That’s what’s got me a bit fucked up about the idea, that’s all.”

Now it’s your turn to hesitate, forcing yourself to actually consider the question rather than just leaning in to the answering of it, knee-jerking in an effort to get what you want, which is _him_ , with you, where he belongs, all the time. No matter the consequences, no matter the slow-acting poison, no matter the pain. His or yours, you could face it if you _had_ him.

And you can’t, not completely. His heart isn’t only yours, and he can only love you with so much of his essence without sacrificing some portion of his self. Some must be for Roxy and some for Vriska and some for the Gods and some for whatever it is he’s thinking about when he stares out at the horizon, a furrow waxing and waning between his eyebrows.

You know you can’t lock him somewhere safe, in his own velvet bonds, without losing him. But you are as greedy for his love as the prince in the tales of the suppliant peahen that laid daily golden eggs; seeking the riches at their source, a hypothetical infinite supply of gold in the thing’s belly, he slew the peahen to open it up, but in the end had only a dead animal for his avarice where he could have had the eggs and a feathery, living thing only too willing to give them to him when it could.

Privately, having _met_ peacocks and peahens alike, roaming the palace grounds, you somewhat doubted this to be the entire story, since ‘willing’ and ‘suppliant’ were certainly two words you would never think to associate with the horrible, screeching beasts. But these whispered doubts as to the veracity of the concept were to be privately shared with your sister once the lights were extinguished and the curtains drawn.

There was a maid who told you and Jane those sorts of bedtime fables when you were very young, cuddled up beneath your blankets, never more than a hand’s reach from each other, what with your night terrors and how she could never manage to fall asleep alone in bed. Still true of her, from what you hear. How little either of you seem to have learned their lessons. Mother didn’t like that maid much, and she disappeared before too long, replaced with a lady of more loyal inclinations, as it was explained to you. A few months later, she was no longer loyal enough, and she was replaced, too.

At least you had each other, you and Janey, until you didn’t. Inadequate, _incompetent_ , but never disloyal. Not to mother, at least.

You do wonder sometimes what she’d think of you, if she could see what you’ve been up to. Were it not for the brief, eminently justifiable crying jag, and a few other such dips and valleys, you’ve actually been comporting yourself rather well.

Too little, too late, there. Better to move on from it entirely.

“I prefer not to sleep alone, if I can avoid it,” you say. “Spending time solely with myself and my thoughts, it’s never done me much good.”

Dirk exhales shortly in response, almost a laugh. “I get that. Little close to home, there.”

You snuggle a little closer to him, no easy feat on the ramshackle dock. Frankly, you’re just lucky no one’s come along and tripped over you. But it’s a reminder, what he’s saying, that you’re truly not the only one here with some sort of baggage or another, though Dirk’s seems to be long since sorted through and packed away. You do wish there was something you could help him with, but he’s just so - so - so damn admirably self-sufficient! It really is enough to drive a man batty, trying to rise to meet the challenge posed by his sheer existence.

His chest shakes with suppressed laughter.

“ _What_?” you grumble. “I know I must be a real sight, Strider, but it is rather rude to laugh at one’s poor distraught paramour in the throes of their emotional turmoil.”

“It’s just really sweet, how you’re _still_ trying to take care of me, like I need it.”

“Someone’s got to do it,” you protest. “You’ve been kinder and more understanding than I’ve any right to ask for, let alone expect, and I just…”

“Learned the hard way. Gotta pull my shit together and be nice.”

“You really don’t. I actually don’t deal very well with people being too nice to me, it’s confusing and I tend to do stupid things when I’m confused. And, you know, in general,” you sniff, burying your face in the crook of his arm, in the comforting folds of his soft cotton overshirt.

He squeezes your hand a little tighter, but doesn’t say anything, though you get the sense that he’d like to.

Regardless of how terrifically silly it must look, you lay there with him for a while, watching the light change and the calm waters lap against the Black Diamond II and feeling his chest rise and fall steadily. You still would like to curl up inside him, somehow, but that is on the back-burner, for the moment. In a sense, you seem to have _won_ the dialogue, as it were. So you will get to go on this adventure, and you’ll get to bring Dirk along with you, _willingly_. Having your cake and eating it too, you’ll certainly never complain about that sort of resolution.

“So,” he says quietly, leaning in to kiss the top of your head. “Here’s what I’m thinkin’. We walk back to _Starlight’s End_ , hash details, have dinner, I’ll chat with Kanaya myself for a bit, just to make sure we’re on the same page, run a few errands, and then… I don’t think I’ve got another late night in me, hardly fuckin’ slept, so… that sound good?”

“Very good,” you say, shifting up on your elbow, the boards of the dock streaking your elbow an unbecoming brownish-grey. “Ugh. Perhaps we’ll have time for another bath at some point.”

“Perhaps,” he agrees, helping you up as the dock creaks under you and offering you your pack of belongings. “But you look just fine to me, dude.”

Slinging the pack over your shoulder, you follow him back to the tavern, and proceed to do exactly that, more or less. The trip to _Starlight’s End_ is quiet and without incident, at least between the two of you. You hang close to him, not yet comfortable wending your way over piecemeal cobblestone paths and dilapidated foot-bridges on your own. He doesn’t offer to carry you; that’s good, because it would feel disingenuous, at this point, not yet knowing if you’ve truly smoothed things over.

Your boots are sturdy, the hive of activity in the Court is not impassible, and with him, at least, no one is bothering to look at _you_. For once, you are perfectly content to sink into his shadow, to follow, not to think at all. The air is getting chilly as the sun begins to set, and it’s a relief when he ushers you in to the main body of the tavern, the warmth of the crowded space and the kitchen stoves rolling out over you as you find your way inside.

A handful of the crew appears to be settled in around the table where you left them, though Roxy has changed into her typical clothes, Feferi is positively draped in gold chains and a tiara, all of which sparkle in the lantern-light with a freshly polished sheen, and Nepeta has obtained some kind of massive, drapey velvet coat in forest green velvet, trimmed with furs. Karkat looks exactly as he did when you left him, right down to the slight scowl with which he greets you.

You smile back. Slowly, you’re figuring out how to tell what he does and doesn’t mean, confusing as it is.

“What’s the verdict?” Roxy calls, over the sounds of life and dinner-consumption underway.

“He says ‘yes’!” you call back, abruptly remembering that you actually _are_ quite excited for all this, for reasons totally unrelated to your personal development. Swashbuckling adventure, elaborate subterfuge, wining and dining _but in a piratey way_ , slicing an evil old slaver to ribbons and achieving _revenge_!

Dirk snorts at your enthusiasm, but doesn’t stop you from jostling your way in next to Roxy and asking eagerly about her day. Distraction, yes! She’s been training some of Kanaya’s more recent recruits in the kitchens, a fairly typical job that she takes on when they stay at _Starlight’s End_ in exchange for free board. Hence the unusually elaborate dinner.

The previous night, the stew was very good, the bread equally delicious, though just about anything would have passed muster after months at sea.

Tonight, you’ve some kind of meat-roll you don’t immediately recognize, lightly breaded and wrapped in a sort of pinwheel configuration around hot melty cheese, spinach, and sliced mushrooms, drenched in a savory gravy of the drippings, and a pile of buttery mashed potatoes. It it really just the thing after sobbing your eyes out for half an hour, hot and filling and delicious.

“We all learned a valuable lesson about _remembering to cut the twine off_ when one of the poor little dudes tested their pinwheel and just about lost a tooth,” she sighs when you try to interrupt her rundown of the experience to compliment her effusively. “Glad it all paid off in the end!”

“Oh, it most assuredly did!” you agree, through a mouthful of potatoes. It is somewhat difficult to stop eating. You really haven’t been taking the best care of yourself.

“Careful, don’t choke! No one’s gonna take it from you,” she laughs. “Well, I don’t actually know everyone in the tavern, but if anyone tries they’ll lose a hand.”

You nod gratefully and focus on eating. Dirk heads upstairs to round up the rest of the crew, and in the meantime, you trade talk of what you’ll do over the next few days.

The bookstore is floated as an idea; Feferi offers to come with, and suddenly everyone is _in_ , which wasn’t what you were expecting, but is sort of exciting! You ask about beaches, and apparently there is a very cool beach that is made up entirely of wave-smoothed black stones interspersed with agates and petrified wood a fairly short paddle from the Court, though the land is harsh and largely uninhabited. Karkat is reluctantly coerced into offering to borrow a day-boat from some acquaintance, so that will be an exciting afternoon out! Aradia, without pushing, once she comes down to join in, wants very much to teach you how to swim, and as encouragement, she brings up the mass underwater graveyard, which is likely piled with stripped-bare skeletons after centuries of use. Wouldn’t that be fun?

It is a tad bit overwhelming, actually, but you say ‘yes’ to everything with the thought that you can probably chicken out later. To be fair, it _does_ sound kind of wonderful.

Kanaya and Dirk return from her office, at some point, though you never noticed them enter, neither of them looking especially pleased with each other. Dirk clears his throat, and you stop midway through a multi-part, meandering question about where you might be able to purchase gold leaf. For all the skulls you are sure to acquire if you do accompany Aradia out to the bone pile.

“The Ascension can easily carry six, along with our cargo. Jake, Kanaya, me, and Vriska. Two more sign-ons before we start planning, and before you ask, Karkat’s in charge onshore while mom and dad are gone.”

Karkat punches the air in vague celebration while the rest of the crew immediately begins to argue about who should claim the other two spots.

“How come Vriska gets automatic sign-on?” Roxy complains.

“If we want John with us, we want Vriska with us. Next question,” Dirk says, sighing as Roxy groans.

“Would the aid of the Sea King not suffice?” Equius interjects.

“She is disinclined to be used as an offboard motor. Finds it somewhat undignified, in contrast with other deities I could name,” Kanaya explains, a little flatly. “While she can be counted on to aid us with easily navigable currents and gentle seas, it is important that we reach our destination expediently.”

Based on what you know of the Sea King, that makes sense. The crew continues to argue over the pros and cons of different subsets accompanying you all on this journey, and finally you cut in.

“Excuse me, but I’d like to make a case, if I may?” you say.

“Let’s hear it,” Dirk says, silencing the rest of the crew with a wave of his hands - a gesture that only sometimes seems to work for this purpose, but which fortunately does this time.

“If I’m to impersonate myself, as it were, I would most assuredly be traveling with a coterie of sorts. I believe that you and Roxy would be best suited to the role, seeing as you both rather look the physically-imposing part of a duo charged with my protection, I’d say.” You clear your throat awkwardly. “And I’d like Aradia to come with. She, ah, it might be useful to have someone onboard well-versed in the identification of the loot we could collect, since we’ll be limited in what we can bring home in one voyage, right? What with the size of the vessel.”

You pulled that somewhat out of your ass, but, well, you want Aradia along. And Roxy. If you’re going to share a tiny ship with Vriska, by the Gods, you are going to do all you can to load that ship with people who like you and are _definitely_ , explicitly disinclined to gut you in your sleep or say creepy things to you about your potential or lack thereof.

Dirk nods thoughtfully, Roxy cheers and hugs you, Aradia grins in evident delight, and Kanaya voices her assent, as the rest of the crew reluctantly accedes to the idea.

“It will be as you like it,” Kanaya continues, after a moment. “If we are in agreement, then, I will borrow Roxy and Sollux to make preparations for charting our path and supplying the voyage.”

“And we’re all splitting the loot!” Vriska cuts in. “There’s no way this douchelord isn’t packed to the gills with treasure, if we’ve gotta make three trips, we’re bringing it all home, and if you think we’re living like kings _now_ , just wait!”

Now _everyone_ is cheering in earnest, and your eyes must be wide as saucers. That seems a decidedly un-Vriska-like pronouncement, but as you watch, she glances up at Dirk, and he puts a hand on her shoulder, and she grins like all is right in the world.

You feel a little sick at the sight of it, but mostly confused. Like everything about their relationship always has and probably always will confuse you. Maybe everything about Dirk, even, for all you wish you could slice him open and scoop the love and the meaning and the neat, straightforward significance out from the tangle of innards within his breast. If he were dead, he would still be meat and bones, the real stuff, but there is something other to him, and it aches at you that Vriska sees it, too. You want to keep it for yourself. You want to _have_ it in the first place.

And you’re already back to acting ridiculous and horrible, all the things that keep getting you into this mess. You wish you understood where it all came from, the frantic desire to sink your fingernails into anything that makes existing hurt a little less, to torture anything ‘good’ into something that can fit in the box labelled ‘real’.

Hopefully Kanaya will be able to help with that, a little. Maybe after you finish up with this adventure, tidy up the last of her loose ends for her, she will be able to look at you with her impossibly understanding, level gaze and tell you exactly what you need to do to get better. She is distracted right now, and who wouldn’t be, what with the unscrupulous villain who cruelly murdered her mother still alive and no doubt doing evil from afar!

You do know what it is like, to lose your mother. Perhaps that is what she sees in you! Because otherwise, there is really not too much your backstories could conceivably have in common.

Neither of you were born pirates, you suppose. Though she a slave and you a prince, extremely different stations to the greatest extent of that phrase. You’ll have to give the matter some thought, later. For now, you turn back to the table, your dinner mostly done, sipping water and dragging a crusty bit of bread through the leavings on your plate, while Nepeta begins to regale the table with a story about her afternoon spent puttering around in a gambling parlor with Equius, positively cleaning up at some form of poker or another.

Dirk presses a kiss to the top of your head and rubs your shoulders for a moment before heading out, and you don’t have to exchange words to know that he’s trying to remind you of his love, like he always is, with so many of the things he does. You stretch to kiss the back of his hand, and he laughs gently, strokes your cheek, and leaves.

Errands, right. You sigh and throw yourself into socializing. It helps. It truly does. Aradia suggests a bar fight, and is soundly shot down; half the table is still hungover from the previous night. Everyone winds up playing a drinking game called ‘raise your glass’, which is very fun, and no one minds that you are drinking water and Roxy, once she returns from her meeting with Kanaya, is miming from her own empty glass. The gist of it is, everyone goes around and says something scandalous that they have done, and everyone else who has done the thing ‘raises their glass’, and the first to empty it wins.

If you were playing properly, actually drinking, you definitely would have won. That said, it is somewhat hilarious to learn the shenanigans that the rest of the crew has gotten up to. Several people, including you, drink when Aradia announces ‘boned a pair of twins!’. No one immediately drinks when Sollux follows up, deadpan, ‘murdered a pair of twins’, though just about everyone laughs. Everyone _but_ you at the table has fucked a King, and boy, if that doesn’t put you out a bit, for just a second, before you realize you’re kind of… okay with it.

Huh.

The major takeaway, though, is reinforcement that different things are normal, here. It has taken some getting used to, but you wouldn’t trade in any of it, even the somewhat graphic murder-inclination, for anything.

But the atmosphere is as good as alcohol when it comes to making your chest feel warm and a little bubbly, and everything has worked out in your favor so far. You get Roxy and Aradia and Dirk and Kanaya basically all to yourself, and how hard can it be to avoid Vriska for a week or two on a tiny vessel?

The evening doesn't drag, it moves forward at a brisk clip, until suddenly, Dirk is back, carting a massive brown paper package as though it weighs nothing. He squeezes your shoulder midway through a half-serious offer to pierce a few more holes in Roxy's ears, if she'd like, you're very good at it, did all of yours yourself, and you look up. Your first reaction, as usual, is to smile in relief at his presence. He smiles back.

"C'mon. I'm headed upstairs. Want to show you something."

"To the room?" you ask, tilting your head curiously.

"Not yet. Follow me, if I'm not tearing you away from anything?"

Roxy raises her glass to 'cheers' at you as you stand, but otherwise you're mostly met with a flurry of goodbyes and vague, slightly lewd insinuations. You 'cheers' back, then turn to follow Dirk obediently up the stairs.

As he said, you climb past the first and second landing, up to the attic where all the goods are stored, though he leads you to a window instead of to any of the locked storage vestibules, propping it open, indicating the slate roof.

"Nice place to come for some privacy," he suggests.

"Oh! Wow, sure," you agree, peeking out through the window, which protrudes slightly over the slant of the tiled roof, the slate extending both up and down from the opening in the building's structure.

“Here. I’ll go first, if you -”

“I can climb!” you insist, budging past him and wriggling your way out the window as best you can, finding yourself balanced somewhat precariously on the steep incline. The night has cooled precipitously, and the sea breeze rolling in is damp with fog, but none of that stops you from clambering up the slanted surface until Dirk has room to join you, lugging his parcel after him.

He joins you easily, like he’s done this a hundred times, sliding in next to you with characteristic grace. It really is a kind of grace, how he moves. Different than your sort, what you were taught and what comes to you naturally. Just complete command of his body, comfort in it, intimate familiarity with what it can do.

You wish you could see all of the stars, when you lean back, instead of just the diaphanous mass of grey-black clouds shifting overhead, only occasionally parting to reveal a few distant flecks of light.

“Do you miss her?” he asks, nudging you with his shoulder as he joins you in squinting up, waiting for the next glimpse of the King’s star-painted sky.

“Of course. But also - not so much as I expected. I think she might have been my first friend. I’m very good at letting go, though, when I have to. I was never going to be able to keep her forever. Most things don’t last.”

“Sometimes that makes it more special.”

“I don’t think I’m quite there yet, Dirk. I don’t know where I am, but it’s not… there, wherever you are. How the devil did you pull it off, anyway? I don’t understand how in the blazes you managed to become so… not quite well adjusted, heh, but… how’d you become what you are? Did someone help you?”

He snorts, not quite the reaction you were expecting.

“S’funny,” he replies, by way of explanation for his response, when you look at him with your biggest, confused-est eyes. “Vriska asked the same thing a little while ago. Uh. Truth is, I knew what I was and what I wanted to be, and I let that guide me. At first. It works for a little while, knowing _exactly_ what you want, punishing yourself until you fit the insane ideal you’ve cooked up in your dumbass little ten-year-old brain, but in the end, _obviously_ someone helped me. Vriska and the crew. Gave me a purpose. Something to love. Love, for its own sake. Since without that, I’d just live in my own head, twist myself into progressively stupider shapes and roles trying to find _something_ that _meant something_ , that like… filled the hugeass hole in my chest that came from not being able to go home, knowing that I had no one but myself, how long I literally _had_ to think like that to keep myself alive. Obviously it’s still there. I just had to get out of my own fucking head, find something else to give a shit about, in the end. Putting that energy to, uh, fixing other people, loving other people, doing what I’m good at, instead of torturing myself.”

“That sounds… hard,” you say quietly. “And I don’t know what I am or what I was or what I want to be.”

“We can work on that. You can be anything. That’s a lot of choice. And kind of the wrong question, I think? Bigass grandiose contemplation, locked up in my quarters or whatever, it’s never helped me much. Think about… what you want to do next? Just, super simple. This thing with Kanaya, I didn’t - it really ground my gears, the first time I heard it, but I get it. Something to do. I just hope you know that’s all it is. Just the next thing in a whole list of awesome things you’re going to do. If you keep doing the shit you want to do, you’ll end up being someone you want to be.”

“That’s what I thought I was doing!” you argue. “Er. Sort of. In a sense.”

“I figured you wanted to be a fairytale hero, not a swabbie, dude. And I mean, the sex stuff, I’m pretty sure that was just what you thought, uh, correctly, that I wanted. You just missed how much I also want you to be free of that shit, before we… y’know. How much I don’t want to make things worse.”

“You didn’t. I did.”

“Oh, don’t fight me on this. I offered you a lot of shit that turns out to be hard to pull off, in practice, dealing with an unfamiliar ship and my kind of insane sense of obligation. Which… maybe I do need someone to save me from myself, in that respect. And you tried. Don’t think I forgot what I promised, though. I didn’t.”

He lifts the brown-paper package, hands it to you. The weight of it is familiar, but it’s so well-wrapped that you can’t quite parse the shape until you’ve got the twine and most of the paper itself undone.

It’s a guitar, the body of which is some kind of beautifully rich dark wood, the neck long and elegant. The strings are golden colored tight-strung metal, perfectly in tune when you strum at it experimentally. Beautiful, the noise much richer, if you’re being honest, than the battered old instrument Aradia carts around, though you’ll always have a special affection for that one.

Your gasp of surprise catches in your throat, and you run your fingers over the glossy surface helplessly, unsure of what to say.

“It’s not done,” he says quickly. “I mean, I bought it tonight. I thought I’d paint it for you. Horses. I’m really good at horses, I promise I’ll do normal ones, with muscles in normal places. You shouldn’t have to borrow one whenever you want to play, that’s insane when we’re all completely loaded, basically shitting gold all up in here.”

His nervous movements shift the slate tiles beneath you, his hands slightly outstretched like he’s ready to stop you from doing something ridiculous, like trying to toss it into the canal or reject it or something of that nature.

But you have no intention of doing any such thing. You grip the body of the the instrument so tightly that the strings bite into your arm, cradling it close to your body. A whole guitar. You didn’t completely realize how badly you wanted one, until now. This, and all your books, and the few little treasures you brought along, and he _gets it_ , he must have understood something of what you said.

“Thank you,” you whisper, rolling over as much as you can without loosening your grip, kind of awkwardly kissing his shoulder, which is all that is within reach.

He grins in earnest.

“You like it? Seriously?”

“Dirk, it’s the best thing I can imagine,” you say, unnerved by your own sincerity. “Thank you, truly.”

“I promised you a lot of songs, too, so d’you think we can start there, getting this back on the right track?”

You toy with the tuning pegs on the headstock, feeling out the tune, finding it quite satisfactory. Aradia’s guitar is smaller, takes a little more force to get the right sound out of, whereas the lightest brush to the strings and the gentlest touch to the frets produces the proper noise. This will take some getting used to.

“I could try to accompany you,” you offer. “Though I can’t promise anything, haven’t really gotten the hang of this one, yet.”

“No problem. Can’t sound worse than me.”

Before you can get offended on his behalf, he begins to hum a tune instead of trying to start you on a key - you’re grateful for that, you still don’t really get the mechanical aspect of things - and you slowly pick it up, growing accustomed to the nuances of the instrument up as you go.

“Beautiful,” he says, after a few minutes, and he isn’t looking at the guitar.

You flush brilliantly red, hoping that the relative darkness of the encroaching night makes it at least a little difficult to discern the frivolity of your affections. After you’ve gotten comfortable enough to riff, you settle back into the main tune as he begins to sing, his voice rough and not especially skilled, but quintessentially him, low and calm and comforting.

[[Tune: Wild Mountain Thyme]](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_SUscfUarcs)

_Oh, the groundswell’s eased to glass_  
_And the shearwaters gone quiet_  
_As the sleeping sea beneath us_  
_Draws us closer to the harbor_

_Watch the stars, hold our course_  
_As the Gods guide in silence_  
_And we’ll sail at their pleasure_  
_In pursuit of safe horizons_  
_Watch the stars, hold our course_

_Trim the sails, tie them fast_  
_For the winds are surely shifting_  
_Lay beneath them as they billow_  
_As the lines go taut and twisting_

_Watch the stars, hold our course_  
_As the Gods guide in silence_  
_And we’ll sail at their pleasure_  
_In pursuit of safe horizons_  
_Watch the stars, hold our course_

_When the Dead King calls us home_  
_We will surely go together_  
_For so long as I can keep you_  
_Hand in hand, we’ll face the weather_

_Watch the stars, hold our course_  
_As the Gods guide in silence_  
_And we’ll sail at their pleasure_  
_In pursuit of safe horizons_  
_Watch the stars, hold our course_  
_On the breeze unabating_  
_Though the Isle’s out of eyeshot_  
_Still its cliffs stand, white and waiting_  
_Watch the stars, hold our course_

As his voice fades out of the final chorus, he leans in and presses a kiss to your cheek, gentle and unassuming. When you briefly glance away from your fingering, your brow knit in concentration as you begin to spiral off into something new, a melody born of his song, he’s looking at you again.

It doesn’t burn like it sometimes does, and the place where his lips brushed your cheek just feels warm and pleasant. You suppose this is because you’ve earned it properly, done something right. Maybe even a few things. You _can_ do this correctly. After all, you already have the fierce need to love someone other than yourself, to have _someone_ to think of and some hope to live in outside of your own shitty, convoluted brain. You just need the other part, the you-part where you make a self.

Something he’ll really like, like the music.

When he leans in again, maybe just to kiss your temple or your cheek again, you turn and kiss him back, chaste and simple. As you do so, some measure of tension leaves his shoulders, and he rests his forehead against you as you turn back to your improvising.

“I wish you could see how much you’ve grown already,” he says quietly.

“I don’t know. Sometimes I think I can,” you say. “But I’m usually proven incorrect rather quickly, heh.”

“Nah, legit, you’re doing something amazing, dude. However you want to do it, whether you want to… go right the fuck back to the drawing board, burn it all, start fresh, _anything_ , I’ll back you up. I trust you, okay?”

“Probably a bad idea.”

“Or a great idea, if you prove me right.”

“Rather a lot of pressure, don’t you think?” you huff.

“You can take it. You’re tougher than you look.”

“Aw, _sort of_ a compliment,” you laugh, elbowing him in the side, though it costs you your intended note.

“I’m serious, though. I get it, that you don’t… necessarily think the shit you went through was _bad_. Callouses or not, anything you do leaves a mark on you. All I can do, I think, is dilute the iffy shit with categorically good shit, as well as I can. And like, make it so you don’t need to protect yourself from me. Alright? That’s the dream. I’ll try not to push too hard. But I _am_ gonna want to borrow that guitar tomorrow, so I can get to work on it.”

“You’ll have to pry it from my cold, dead hands,” you say, only marginally joking. “But alright, indeed. We shall simply have to agree to disagree. Either way, I intend to exorcise my past all the same, so let’s not worry too much about semantics and who did what to whomst.”

“Good start,” he sighs, kissing you again, so very careful and deliberate.

For now, that’s alright, being treated as though you’re something precious. Certainly rather novel, as things go. You wouldn’t want it all the time. But like so many things, you can accept from him what you couldn’t conceive of taking from anyone else’s hands.

“Can we go to bed now?” you ask, stilling your fingerwork and setting the guitar down in your lap, finding that your extremities have gone a little stiff with the chill of the night air. “It’s cold.”

“Hm. Before we get there, can you tell me what you want to do tonight?”

You sigh melodramatically, and if your hands weren’t full, you’d throw them up to the vault of the sky in vexation at the return of _this_ old saw.

“Oh, fine! I’d like to hold you, is that _acceptable_?”

“Kissing?” he continues patiently.

“Must you torment me so?” you complain. “ _Yes_ , I’d thought that to be a given by now.”

“No givens. Lookin’ forward to it, though. C’mon, let’s go.”

He climbs back into the attic through the open window as you pack your guitar away, handing it down to him before struggling your way inside on your own. He carries it down to the room for you, waits for you to unlock the door, and follows you in.

“I gave my key back,” he says, by way of explanation. “They’re technically single-occupancy, anyway.”

The bedclothes have been tidied and the pitcher on the shelf refilled, and you take a moment to clean yourself of any errant dock filth and to fuss over him a bit before letting him into your bed, the light extinguished, the covers drawn over you both. It’s still a bit chilly inside, but you’re cozy enough with him in your arms, and you kiss his forehead until he laughs and shakes away.

“Why _do_ you do that?” he jokingly complains, kissing you right back until your jaw is a little damp and ticklish with it.

“It reminds me that I love you,” you say.

This quiets him down a bit, and you resume with your feather-light kisses, and this time he doesn’t interrupt.

In time, you fall asleep like that, your fingers twined in his soft hair, your face still smooshed up against his. Cradling him to your chest, you can almost feel his heartbeat. Even in your dreams.


	9. Ode to the Wind King (or, pulling it together!)

For once, you wake up slowly, no immediate transition from nightmare to reality, just the gradual realization that you’re very warm and comfortable all over. The room smells pleasant; Dirk’s hair still carries the scent of jasmine, though tempered with sea salt from his meanderings about the Court. And he rests half-atop you, very much in your arms, the only tension in his sleeping body his own reciprocal grasp on your shoulder.

You blink in the beginnings of morning light. Up early again. What an odd habit to get started with, here of all places. Whatever. You don’t especially want to move, certainly don’t want to rouse him prematurely from his peaceful-looking slumber. Settling back into the pillow, you ghost your fingertips over the soft hair running down the nape of his neck. 

From this angle, his face more or less resting on your pec, you can’t see more than the slight flutter of his eyelashes in response. But his breathing and heartrate still marginally as you observe him further, so you continue at it. Hopefully he is having some sort of sweet dream.

It’s nice to touch him. A common thought that occurs to you, sure, but especially this way, when it’s just for you, for nothing but the joy of petting someone pleasantly tactile and warm who you also happen to adore. A good word for it. Maybe even a better word than love. So far. You lean in slightly to kiss the top of his head, right at the part of his sleep-tousled hair. He doesn’t stir.

Like this, you watch the sunrise, without actually looking at anything but the small square of sky visible through the little window. Perhaps it’s the same approximate transition of faded purple-blue to rosey dawn to golden sun backlighting the simple, translucent curtain as it was yesterday, but it looks different this morning.

He begins to shift about on his own time, accidentally jamming your nipple piercing against the delicate skin of his eyelid. Maybe not an ideal wakeup call, though you remedy it by scooping him up as he makes a plaintive grumble of confusion and kissing it better as he snuggles closer and clings to sleep. His dark eyes, once they flutter open, lock to your face and stay there. You kiss him on the nose, and he snorts out a laugh.

“Mornin’,” he mumbles.

“Good morning, dear heart.”

“Sleep okay?”

“Very well,” you reassure him. “Just enjoying this.”

“Mmm. Yeah, I can be a sexy corpse for a while longer,” he sighs, stretching out, blinking a few times, and settling his face back down against your clavicle, nuzzling closer and making you laugh.

“Corpses don’t snuggle,” you inform him, with faux-severity.

“Thank fuck, I’d never be able to compete,” he mumbles up into your neck, and you shove his shoulder playfully.

“Up you go, then, if you’re conscious enough to make a mockery of me, you’re conscious enough to sit up,” you grouse. “Can’t just lounge about in bed all day.”

“Can’t we?”

“No,” you sigh. “Alas. We must have many obligations and errands and suchlike, if we’re to leave within the next few days, hm?”

He sits up reluctantly, his hand lingering on your chest, though he pauses to collect himself, pats you on the cheek, and cracks his back so dramatically that you half expect his head to roll off his shoulders in the aftermath of the sound.

“Kanaya’s going to need help getting her catboat in order, though it shouldn’t be too much of a job. Stocking, planning, setting our course…” As he speaks, he gathers himself up, stands, and begins to pace about, retrieving his clothing, pausing to brush his teeth, splash fresh water across his face, straighten his hair.

It’s a delight to watch him fuss over it, especially when it’s gone all messy as it has throughout the night. He’s meticulous as a cat cleaning butter from his paws; not a hair can be out of place. Always a good sign, too, that he’s feeling invigorated in some respect, ready to meet the day.

“Other various and sundry items as well!” you suggest. “To pull this whole shebang off, I’d imagine the greatest task will be strategizing, getting a sense of what we need in order to meet the challenge, fill our roles, that sort of thing.”

“Clothes,” he says contemplatively. “You need new clothes. Prince-y shit, right? Unless you’re an undercover prince.”

“Prince-y shit,” you echo, relaxing as he seems to be more than amenable to the idea. It wasn’t just talk, thank fuck. He’s actually okay with it. “I’ve no intentions of making things any more complicated than they need to be. Playing it straight, doing this one by the book, in and out, a place for everything and everything in its place! No room for error. So it’ll be you and Roxy getting mild-to-moderately dolled up as well, mark my words, this’ll be a full production.”

“I can definitely get behind that energy,” he laughs. “Alright. We do the work now, oil the gears early so they spin quiet when it’s time to actually get moving. Then it’s all banquets and poetry-recitation and whatever the fuck the aristocracy gets up to in their copious free time.”

“Quite so!” you agree. “I just wonder where I’ll be able to find anything in a suitably fancy-type Aetrian style that doesn’t look as though I’ve been scrubbing decks in it.”

“Mm, yeah. Rox and I can probably get away with our deck clothes, but that’ll be the job, won’t it. Well, you can grill Karkat if he’s downstairs. Someone’ll know. Everything washes up at the Court eventually.”

“Good,” you say, taking one last moment to relax into your pillow before you stand to join him. “Really, thanks, Dirk. Uh, as status updates go, I think I’m doing very well, at the moment. Feeling… heartened, I guess. Grateful to have you on my team.”

“Always, dude,” he says, pulling on his shirt and smiling slightly over his shoulder. “But I’m glad it’s translating well at the moment.”

“That _is_ the hard part, isn’t it? Translations. Most books in Common didn’t have Aetrian translations, but the few that did, those were like goddamned codebreakers for me, though eventually I got better at the language and figured out that half of them were only vaguely accurate at best, and what a letdown that was. The Aetrian versions really got one’s hopes up with regard to explicit affection between adventuresome bros! Common is so dodgy about that kind of thing, like most kinds of love are all awfully cloak-and-dagger, some big world-endy secret that must be concealed at all costs. Except for the normal kind, obviously, where a princess or maiden of devastating purity shares a chaste kiss with a golden-hearted scoundrel of one sort or another, but, well, the country of Florin doesn’t exist either, I guess.”

He exhales, one of those moments where you get the sense that he’d like to say something but is generously choosing not to. 

“Did you bring any books in Aetrian?” he asks instead, a bit of a surprising response, you’ll admit. “I didn’t want to get nosey about your stuff, but I could - I mean, I’ve thought about trying to learn. Might be useful at some point.”

“Oh, you really don’t have to do that,” you reply hastily, as your heart grows feathery wings and flutters up into your throat. “I only brought a few of my favorites, and they’re all in Common.”

“No worries,” he says, equally quick to respond, practically backing up a step and putting his palms up. “Just, uh, kinda brainstorming ways I could… meet you where you are. Instead of sorta expecting you to just - well, obviously you’re doing a great job of adjusting. But I haven’t really… adjusted much? And I could be adjusting more. That’d only be fair.”

He looks up at you hopefully, in the process of lacing his boots.

“I’m pretty good with languages. It’s kind of a whole thing with me.”

“Well, for the sake of verisimilitude, it might make sense if you, as a member of my escort, had picked up a bit,” you suggest. “I’d - only if you really want, of course, I don’t know if it’s something that would… unsettle you, I mean, that I still care about it, which I think I sort of do? But I’d… yes. I would… that would be nice, Dirk. Thank you for thinking to… bring it up.”

You exhale abruptly, managing a smile that he reciprocates. Your heart threatens to fly away for good, to settle in his arms and stay there like a nesting dove. At moments like these, you think that maybe it already has.

Pausing at the door, he straightens your hair and kisses your cheek before you head downstairs. And you could get used to this. Though of course, you could get used to anything. But especially to this. It is so much less foreboding, climbing down the creaking staircase with him just ahead of you. With a full, purposeful, _deliberate_ day to fill with things and stuff.

He breaks away to rouse any sleeping crew members from the common room, and you finish the flight of stairs alone, feeling the strangest sense of deja vu. Though you’re not the first up by a long shot, this time.

Aradia is already downstairs, with a finished plate of some sort of porridge set in front of her. Roxy is sitting _on_ the table, for whatever reason, her apron mussed and a streak of flour across her nose. Feferi and Karkat are engaged in a surprisingly low-volume conversation at the same table, over a plate containing a large, fleshy orange fruit filled with orbiculate black seeds that you wholly do not recognize, which they are sporadically digging at with grapefruit spoons.

No one reacts in any kind of dramatic way when you settle in on the bench; Roxy leans over to tousle your hair, complaining about how weird it looks when you’re all tidied up, streaking it with flour and making you sneeze. Aradia asks how you slept, and Feferi flags over a member of the team of waitstaff to order more breakfast. 

This time, the food that’s brought out consists mainly of stacks and stacks of griddle-fried cakes of sweet flour, piled high with orange-sections and some sort of fruity syrup. Sticky and tart and delicious and very difficult to eat without gumming up your fingers and smearing the resulting mess on your clothing, though you manage fairly well, you think. They’re really pulling out all the stops for this meal spread, and you may as well start to get back in the habit of comporting yourself as befits a fellow of your station, so to speak.

Your hypothetical, duplicitously-feigned station! In practice, this means you pay a great deal more attention to your use of silverware than you have since you last embarked with the crew of the Diamond. It’s a little like riding a horse; even after quite some time, all the muscle memory is there. This element of princely convention was never so much of a difficulty for you. Prim and proper as they come, that’s what you’d hypothetically say of yourself if anyone were to ask or care!

“Is there yet an agenda for the day?” you ask, setting your fork and knife delicately in the upper-plate configuration to announce that you have finished supping. “I’m just about chomping at the bit to get out there and do something, get the ol’ pigskin rolling or however the expression goes, so - any plans, or ought I to start spouting suggestions?”

“Actually,” Karkat cuts in. “You’ve been dodging me for the last two days, English, I’ve got a fuckton of money for you. Give me any more shit and I’m this close to charging you interest to hold onto it.”

“Oh, right! My apologies, the thought, er, slipped my mind, repeatedly, basically every time anyone reminded me of it, heh. Quite sorry for the trouble.”

“Don’t spend it all in one place, watch out for pickpockets, don’t take any wooden nickels,” he sighs, hefting a sizable leather pouch, strung tight but still bulging with, presumably, coins.

You take it from him, surprised by the weight. The Velvet Court’s coinage is almost entirely gold; by your approximation, at least 18 karat in quality, though a bit variable in mintage. Each of the ‘crowns’ is about the size of your thumbtip, fairly uniform in dimensions, stamped with cameo of the queen’s face with a diagonal slash running through it. Picking a few up, you let them fall through your fingers.

“Huh,” you say. “How much would you say one of these is worth?”

Feferi launches off on an explanation of exchange rates with various currencies you’ve never heard of; her family, as you’ve heard, was of some substantial wealth, and you suppose she’d know, though it more or less flows in one ear and out the other.

“Eight for a night here,” Aradia adds, once she’s done, measuring out the sum into your palm. “Gold is rather prodigiously devalued in the Court relative to anywhere else, except in particularly saleable configurations like jewelry or other hardware. For the necessities of life, the only things you’re likely to be paying for, anywhere from two or three for a decent meal or a lengthy gondola transport to in excess of fifteen or twenty for an especially nice weapon might be fair.”

Everyone has an opinion about whether or not this explanation is correct, and you’re beginning to find the sheer volume of _numbers_ being bandied about rather overwhelming.

“Hey, speaking of agendas!” Aradia continues, registering your discomfort. “It’s usually a lot easier to learn by doing, right? What do you want to buy? I’ll come with, we can make a whole thing of it.”

“Clothes is the main one, I really can’t keep wearing these admittedly-quite-spiffy duds forever,” you say gratefully. “Particularly what with the whole adventure quest dealio on the horizon.”

“Outfit montage!” she suggests, clapping her hands in delight.

“I suppose so, whatever that means!” you agree. “And then, you mentioned the bookstore? D’you think we might make a stop there as well?”

As you’ve been speaking, though, it’s becoming more conspicuous that _Starlight’s End_ is rather, uh. Empty? Save for the lot of you, at least, joined now by Nepeta and Equius as well, certainly loud enough to fill the space acoustically. But apart from the few members of the tavern staff puttering about, and ‘few’ is the right way to describe their numbers, you actually know everyone in the room.

Huh.

Aradia continues blithely, eagerly offering her energies to the bookshop proposal and dragging Karkat into the conversation by his metaphorical ear to discuss clotheries and boutiques and whatnot, as you blink in sudden confusion.

“Hold up now,” you’re beginning to interrupt, as Dirk, Vriska, and Sollux tromp down the stairs in sequence, with Kanaya in tow.

There’s a bit of a relief, some people who presumably know what’s going on.

“Good morning, all,” Kanaya announces. “If you’ve all had the chance to wake up properly, we’ll begin the task of converting the tavern space to our temporary seat of command.”

You raise your hand to ask a question, then pull it down quickly and stick it back into your lap when she quirks up an eyebrow. You _really_ have to stop doing that.

“What does that mean?” you ask, very nonchalantly and with an aura of total comfort and familiarity with this and every situation.

“I’ve closed down _Starlight’s End_. Preparation for this endeavor will be my priority for the foreseeable future. I’ll need to see to arrangements for my employees, of course, but that was already something of an inevitability, given my jaunting off across the ocean on a quest for vengeance.”

“Oh, spiffing!” you agree, furrowing your brow sagely. None of that seemed strictly intuitive to you, but you’re certainly willing to nod along. “Can I still go shopping today, then?”

“Mister Strider specifically mentioned that component of the logistics, yes,” she says. “I’d say ‘yes’, but we’ll need to be strategic about the matter, and perhaps we can begin elsewhere. There are a number of tasks to distribute, and Miss Serket has charitably offered your crew’s support.”

Most of what needs doing is shuffled about between the parties present in the near-vacant tavern; Roxy and Karkat are appointed the stewards of provisioning the trip, Equius, Nepeta, and Feferi set out to retrieve the catboat and put together an itinerary of any necessary maintenance, and Sollux and Aradia begin to unroll a massive stack of nautical charts on a corner table.

With Kanaya’s help, you work with Dirk and Vriska to set up a central table, spreading the contents of her office liberally across the surface. Piles of old correspondance, hand-sketched diagrams and schematics, a few aging leather-bound tomes, fresh paper and writing implements.

“This is rather a whole production!” you observe, having sort of thought the preparation would just entail stocking up and getting the boat rolling, as it were.

“Indeed,” Kanaya says. “I’d like to solicit your help with the letter - just for verification, if I could ask you to review its contents with a fine-toothed comb, any cultural idiosyncrasies that might make any element of the story suspect. I’ve already done so myself, and I met further with our _friend_ Eridan last night, and all does appear to be in order. Nonetheless, I would rather be safe than sorry.”

“Roger that!”

Dirk spreads out at your side, once all the rest is sorted out. Vriska and Kanaya begin to look over several differently-sourced schematics of the Estate for infiltration purposes, and he’s tasked with the comparatively somewhat mild job of drawing out his take on aristocratic Aetrian fashion in advance of your shopping trip.

To his credit, he does not complain much about the assignment.

“I mean,” you say, “it’s kind of a keystone to the whole thing, isn’t it? Ensuring I don’t provoke suspicion.”

“Sure,” he sighs, shouldering you affectionately. “Read your letter.”

For the severalth time at least, you wonder what on earth the tension between him and Kanaya could possibly be. They are both very competent and rather ruthlessly pragmatic people, by your reckoning, and share at _least_ three common interests: revenge-piracy, sensibly-applied violence, and the Sea King. You’ve made friends off less than that!

It’s weird to remember that you can just. Well. Ask him.

Huh.

That’s a strange thing to think about in general. You’ve gotten pretty used to just sort of accepting any situation you wind up in on spec, so long as he seems to think it normal, but he rather explicitly said he’d appreciate it if you… did that less, and talked to him more. Well, there’re at least a few more days before you set off for this revengey huppeldepup.

The whole thing is just immensely foreign to you. When you were younger, you think, you talked to Jane about almost everything. That was part of the trouble, that you had to learn to stop doing that so very much as you grew older and could no longer really connect on the same level, since your affairs were so very trivial compared to hers, and it was better to sort them out yourself. That Dirk might find any of the minutiae you get yourself in mental knots over worth talking about strikes you as odd, to say the least, but you’re willing to give it a try.

You sure talk to yourself a lot! And rarely wonder about anyone else’s internal monologue, though you figure that if anyone else _does_ think - itself rather a drastic conclusion to leap to - they probably think the same way you do.

Huh. _Dirk_ definitely has thoughts and feelings and such, and while you can usually figure out what they are without enquiring as to them, in part because he is more obvious than he thinks he is and in part because he talks quite a lot, it might be worth… huh.

Interesting ideas, all of them, at the very least!

Setting your attention entirely to the letter in front of you, you push all such consideration out of your mind for the time being. You’ve already glanced at the thing, of course, but you really put your nose down and go over it word by word. He uses the Aetrian phrase for ‘making peace or reaching an accord’, si paccicotion, though he uses it in the wrong tense. Contextually, you’re pretty sure he means it in the present tense, that he’s still in the act of negotiating things, as evidenced by the request for artifacts and whatnot to serve as aesthetic evidence of loyalty for a prospective _future_ meeting with the Empress and other wording that indicates an active process. 

While he doesn’t mention Jane’s name directly, he’s not incorrect in any implied assumptions; no decisions would be made without her at the table, and there would not be a singular proxy appointed, either. You get the sense that he might be a little frustrated with Aetrian convention in this regard, which is to send a delegation, all of whom are of equal rank and standing, to participate in any sort of diplomatic conversation in the absence of the Empress. Mother didn’t like the idea of any singular person making decisions on her behalf, didn’t trust any individual enough to serve as an ambassador.

Regardless, all appears to be in order. In fact, based on the wording, you think some of the items you’ve yet to unload will be particularly desirable; fine plateware and whatnot, the sort of trappings one might use to host a banquet that suggests willingness to extend a culturally-sensitive hand towards a future collaborator.

It surprises you a bit, when you think about it, that Janey’s thinking about working with a slaver, of all things - that’s a tier further _down_ from pirates in terms of aesthetic evils, and she already found your friends so disgusting. But you suppose she might be planning to double-cross a vulnerable old sociopath or whatever the hell, and if so, you very much support her in her surreptitious backstabbing, and you even regret it a little bit, swiping the victory out from under her!

But oh well. That’s piracy, you suppose, lots of swiping and preclusion of inter-entity collaboration through the bloody murder of one or both entities! Something to get used to.

“This all seems in order,” you announce. “He even writes a bit in Aetrian, though his structure is rather inept. I doubt he has a translator or anything. The grammatical issue is the only incongruity in the thing, and it’s a somewhat confusing tongue in which to write without first-language familiarity.”

Kanaya perks up at that, and you walk her through the wording, excited to have her attention back on you. Dirk looks over your shoulder as you do so, and you notice his drawing and flush quite pink.

Somehow - you’ve no idea how, you can’t draw to save your life - he’s sketched out a remarkable likeness of you in the outfit you were wearing when his crew first hauled you out of the ocean. Well, sort-of-wearing. It’s as though he’s reverse-engineered it from some combination of the remembered tatters of your clothing and his observations of dress in La Ansephemine. Your breath catches in your throat.

He’s drawn you _kindly_ , there’s no other way to put it. As though midway through stepping forward, your jaw canted up rather regally, but seemingly without any intention to it, caught in a moment of quiet but dignified contemplation. Your collared, high-necked and ruffly-sleeved blouse fits you closely, cinched with a waist-high corset and coordinated with a drapey skirt of darker fabric that falls in heavy waves over your knees, gathered up at points to allow for range of motion. Of course, you’re barefoot, but he’s drawn your rings and all your piercings from memory.

The only thing he’s missing are the _immulatio_.

“You needn’t… I mean,” you stutter.

“I’m having fun,” he retorts. “If I’m on dress-sketching duty, you bet your ass I’m gonna do a good job of it.”

“I can’t imagine you ever doing any less.”

He smiles, leans against you for a second, and gets back to work. You go to volunteer your further services to Kanaya and Vriska, wondering how much of the plan you have to know to do a good job as a distraction; the answer to that question fortunately turns out to be ‘not much’, since the layout of Dersian architecture is totally incomprehensible to you, and the blueprint conventions make absolutely no sense. Kanaya assures you that it shouldn’t be a trouble; she’s mostly cross-referencing to refresh her memory from childhood, and if all goes well, which it will, you’ll never even _see_ her and Vriska as they lurk about using the servants’ routes and various nooks and crannies in which one might conceal oneself.

The gist of it is, you’ll coordinate your landing to occur under the cover of darkness. You, Dirk, and Roxy will enter, and either Dirk or Roxy will find a moment to prop open one of three entry points while you’re soliciting as much attention as you can manage to procure in the middle of the night. Easy! They’ll lurk on in from where the ship will likely be docked, within the outer wall, somewhat inland of the sea, up a broad river that flows through the vast estate. Aradia will remain to supervise the trinkets and all on the ship, and act as backup should a signal of some sort be made from within the manor itself.

Admittedly, once Kanaya details the whole thing on one of the diagrams she’s assessed to be reasonably correct, it all makes an awful lot of sense. She’s thought this through _very_ thoroughly. You’re once again quite profoundly reminded of your classes in military history and strategy, when you were still included in such things, with Jane at your side.

It’s awful funny that Janey took such a liking to Vriska, is all. You figure that a few seconds in Kanaya’s company and she’d be quite smitten. The Sea King has rather stellar taste in consorts, you’ll give her that, along with… well, just about anything she might hypothetically ask for, hah.

Really, the more she talks, the more you can see distinctly noble mannerisms in Kanaya’s posture, her affect, obviously, but additionally in her strategic approach. You could very much believe, based on the certainty with which she describes the mode of entry and the meticulousness of her organization, that she might have an army at her command hiding under the counters in the kitchen or something. It’s almost impossible to conceive of her in any position but one of utter authority. Who would dare to so much as imagine her in chains? It doesn’t make a lick of sense.

“So, if that’s… all, then why can’t we just light out as soon as we’ve got the craft loaded, sooner rather than later?” you ask, after a several-minute interlude about outer fortifications and the specific workings of the estate’s system of freshwater dikes and levies set up throughout the grounds to make use of the natural resource of the river.

“There’s a great deal more to review with you,” she says simply. “I won’t have you walking into this plot even slightly unprepared. We’ll run simulations, discuss contingencies, escape plans. I recognize your willingness to make use of your own… capabilities. But after rather a sleepless night, I’ve come to the conclusion that we’ll simply have to prepare our way out of any such potentiality. You will not be put in such a position of vulnerability on my orders.”

“Oh, I wouldn’t call it vulnerability,” you argue, though your gaze flickers over to Dirk. “...but thank you for the consideration. I’ll take full advantage of the opportunity to learn from you, then, you bet your bottom dollar!”

“I’d also ask for as much information as you can furnish me as to the means by which your countrypeople have managed to enslave or kill our gods. If there _is_ some technical means by which Dualscar may be subverting the Dead King’s vision, I’d like to be as well-aware of the theory behind it as possible before we enter the situation.”

You grimace a touch in response to that.

“Enslaving is such an ugly way of - okay, okay, perhaps correct, but still. Ech. And I’m hardly an authority on any of that business. But I do believe we made off with some coelitrovic steel weapons, they’re surprisingly commonplace in a lot of fine steelwork, and not-so-fine, too. Like eating gold leaf, rather pointless but a status symbol of sorts. Is that helpful?”

“I’ll have more questions,” she says simply. “For now, if you’d like to get on your way with the business of clothing-shopping - Mister Strider?”

“Still with you,” Dirk says, a bit shortly, from the other table.

“Whatever you obtain - do your best for verisimilitude, of course, but I’ll be happy to furnish modifications in keeping with the sketches. I’ve done a fair amount of tailor work in my day. It will be no trouble at all.”

“Oh wow! Yes, that sounds rather excellent!” you say, delighted at the prospect. “Can I go, then? Can I bring Dirk?”

“I’ll tell you again, Jake, you don’t need my permission to do anything, as you are an adult, and presumably in full possession of your faculties.”

“Debatable!” you parry cheerfully, though you appreciate the thought.

“Sorry, dude,” Dirk chips in. “Kanaya and I have another meeting of the minds scheduled before I can go gallivanting around the Court.”

You blanch. That leaves you and -

“I’m not digging the idea of tossing you back out there alone, before we have a chance to sort out how you’re defending yourself if something happens, alright?” he adds. “So how about you have a life-changing field trip with Vriska, this time, and I’ll hook up with you guys once you make it to the bookshop?”

Vriska nods and waves her hook in a way that would be sort of friendly and encouraging if it wasn’t a hook and wasn’t attached to Vriska.

“Uh, actually, I -” you begin to say, though at least one God must hear your silent prayers, because Aradia looks over from the chartwork at your presumably audible distress.

“I’m just getting in the way at this point!” she cuts in. “C’mon, can’t I take him?”

“Fuck’s sake, AA, leave me in the lurch, why don’t you, I’ve only got two hands,” Sollux starts to complain.

“Vriska’s got a spare, I bet she’d loooove to help you!” Aradia suggests, hopping up from her seat. “Come on, Jake, one more life-changing field trip for _you and me_ , we’re at least semi-pro at them by now! Ooh, and I promised to swing by and see Mister Zahhak, anyway. Do we have a list of stuff to buy?”

Glancing at Dirk’s sketches, Kanaya drafts a bulleted list, which includes additional tailoring supplies in a handy if-then format to guide your procurement strategies, and you’re paying attention to next to none of it because you are thinking how you might like to kiss Aradia in the most platonic-type way you have ever kissed a person. Or perhaps lay down your life for her. It is pretty much the same thing in your book.

You hadn’t realized how stuffy and confined it was getting in _Starlight’s End_ until you hip-check the canalside door open and breathe the chilly morning air. Alright, you could stand to obtain a coat, but that’s the whole idea, isn’t it! You’ve got this massive purse of gold coins, and a friend, and a mission, and really, what could be better?

At this point, you actually do try to think through it and maybe get to wishing very hard. It seems to have worked as a strategy so far.

“Er, thank you,” you say, as you wait for a gondolier to pass by, Aradia with her wrist poised to flag one down. “I hope you know how much I appreciate the hail-mary.”

“You’re probably going to have to hang out with her eventually, but there’s no reason you should get railroaded into it before you’re ready. I mean, if you don’t have to,” she replies, elbowing you gently as she hails a boat and ushers you in. “Really, Vriska’s not that bad! An acquired taste, I guess, but I’ve had a long time to acquire it, and she grows on you.”

“Black-rot fungi grows on corpses if not cremated quickly enough,” you argue.

“It sure does! I’m just saying. Not to dunk on Dirk or anything, but if you can get along with him, you can get along with her.”

“Alright, alright, just because you say ‘not to dunk on Dirk’ does not disqualify the rest of your sentence from being a dunk on Dirk.”

She giggles, and you crack a reluctant smile in response.

“Glad things seem to be…” she starts, then trails off, sort of watching you as the gondolier begins to pole you off towards one of the shortlist of clothing shops.

“Yes,” you agree quickly. “Seems to be a bit closer to getting sorted out in a mutually amenable sort of way. With a little less in the way of… y’know. Conflict. Hate that stuff. Glad we could get it all ironed out so quickly and succinctly and on a permanent basis!”

“I mean, it’s always complicated, right?”

“Wish you weren’t right, my friend.”

“Awww. So do I! It’s such a pain, the burden of being the only sane and normal person on this crew. So, when are we going corpse-diving?”

You laugh in earnest.

“At this point, probably once we get back from this whole hullaballoo, once all is said and done.”

“Alright, but I’m holding you to that! You don’t have to swim, but you do have to come with me and help me age what I find and all. Oh, actually, I was thinking, I reeeaaally want to see your skull-decorating in action, is that something I could learn? If I swim you up some extra nice skulls?”

“Now _that’s_ a promise I can make!” you say cheerily, actually letting yourself imagine it, a time _after_ the immediate circumstances.

A shop of your own, a proper little apartment set over it, a backroom workspace stocked with all the gold and little gem-y fixtures and everything that you could possibly desire. In your fantasy, Dirk decides to stay there with you, for a good while, possibly with some urging towards that conclusion, but ultimately decides that it was a great idea and that he only _occasionally_ wants to participate in heavily-sanitized piratey jaunts about with the crew, and Aradia comes by in the mornings for a cup of coffee, and actually everyone gives up piracy for good and maybe lives next door, like, all of them in one house or something? You are not really sure how people live in places that are not a boat or a two-month sail southwest, unreachably far away.

It’s all a nice thought, though. By then, you figure things will be sorted out conclusively with Dirk, and he’ll sit and paint with you while you show Aradia how to set colored enamel in a carved-out parietal. And everyone will be having a good time, and Kanaya will stop by and say ‘hello, remember that time when we did that revenge mission? You are my hero, and also immortal now, which is great for you!’

Okay, now you’re getting a bit deep into that one, but you think both the characterization and content hold up as entirely feasible.

“What’re you thinking about?” Aradia asks, her voice rising clear and bell-like over the sound of the pole dragging through the canal.

“Regular stuff,” you say vaguely, then pause. “Which is to say, uh, sort of a daydream about skull carving!”

“Neat!”

You cough a bit conspicuously.

“Sort of a thought, I mean, about what it’ll be like once this whole things is settled and done with. It’s a little bit of a ridiculous flight of fancy, but…” you trail off.

“Hold on, how come skull carving is a flight of fancy? No offense, I was treating that as a given!” she says, making big hopeful eyes at you, which has you smiling again. Particularly because she’s back to wearing her skull hair dec, and the thing’s hollow orbital sockets gaze up at you, too, in a vacant intimation of her wide-eyed, beseeching expression.

“Not so ridiculous, I guess,” you concede. “That’s a little weird, isn’t it, though? Imagining something that might actually happen all wanting-like.”

“Not really,” she says, handing the gondolier three coins as you clamber out of the boat, up to dress shop situated literal inches from the canal. “It’s kind of not weird at all, sorry to break it to you! Especially cool, normal things like messing around with bones.”

That reminds you of your plan to make bone _weapons_ as well, to branch out a bit, and you’re chatting over the idea excitedly as you walk into the shop.

You’ve been, well, _fitted_ for things before, but never actually gone shopping, like, at a real clothing store. You have absolutely no idea what to expect, so it’s a good job you’ve got Aradia by your side and Kanaya’s list crumpled up in your palm.

This particular shop is stacked, floor to ceiling, with what seem, on first inspection, like bolts of fabric. When you look closer, they turn out to be all gowns in varying states of finery, folded up in an artistic display case to highlight the fabrics. You wonder how many of them are stolen from someone or another. Aradia cheerfully informs you that there _is_ an answer to that question, and it is ‘all of them’.

So, faced with a near-empty shop, stewarded by a somewhat bored shopkeeper, you begin to run down the list. Something high-necked and ruffly and long-sleeved, a long, fitted coat, a floor-length velvet skirt, all of it in monochrome hues or else in red, as is the convention of royalty.

About half of what you initially take down fits well enough to purchase, some of it with the promise of tailoring, of course.

Aradia is an excellent shopping partner, enthusiastic at all the right moments, _very_ helpful about carrying things you hand her, and you pay at this shop and move on to the next one, and the next one.

In time, you figure you’ve got enough constituent outfit-components for at least a week, and that’s if you truly re-wear nothing. You get antsy letting Aradia hold everything and wind up with all the bags for yourself, delighted to find that you can carry all of it fairly easily, which you definitely would not have been able to pull off before. No, you can’t bench press Dirk, _yet_. You resolve to maintain a growth mindset on the subject, and eagerly anticipate remedying the situation.

For now, the heaps of heavy, neatly-folded fabric will do nicely.

“Alright!” Aradia notes approvingly, as you locate a final piece, a diaphanous red shirt with long, drapey sleeves that cinch at the wrist. “I can bring this stuff up to the front, if you want to -”

“Ah, one more thing,” you say, distracted by what you’ve revealed by taking the top off the long rack on which it is displayed. A simple vest you wouldn’t have looked at twice, were it not the precise quality of black velvet you’ve been… wondering about. “Hold on. I… I’ll catch up, alright?”

She salutes, half-jokingly, and walks off with your purchases and your slightly-lighter sack of money. You stare at the garment, take it off the rack, feel the weft of it. Yes, it’s remarkably high quality, soft and supple, lightweight.

You quietly slip it into one of your many over-full bags, and join Aradia as she’s completing the purchase.

If the shopkeeper notices that your hands have started shaking, he rather charitably doesn’t say anything about it.

Aradia does, of course. One of the many hazards of friendship, being seen.

“You alright?” she asks, and while her tone is free of overtly solicitous affect, you can sense her concern almost palpably.

Your smile tightens to a grimace as you consider your options. You could probably sort of tell her, for all the good that would do. Aradia has never been the type to fawn over you, even when you say things she probably finds a bit ridiculous or disturbing. Actually, you don’t think she’s ever reacted as though anything you’ve said was disturbing. You appreciate that a lot.

Sitting down beside her as you wait for another gondola, bags stacked around you, you sigh as you wait for your hands to stop shaking so very treacherously.

“Uh,” you reply quite eloquently. “I suppose it’s just an inevitable part of getting kitted back out like I was before. I didn’t think it would feel so odd. In such a strange way, really. I’m excited about it, I mean. Which is a little messed up, since I’ve been doing so much jawing off, lately, about wanting it all to be water under the bridge. Does that make any sense at all? I didn’t think I’d like it so much, getting dressed up all fancy again. Makes me feel a bit off-kilter and I’d really rather be, er, _on_ -kilter about this whole business.”

“To be fair,” she suggests, her smile not wavering, “they’re really pretty clothes, and you look great!”

“I know, right?” you agree. “It sucks a little bit! All of these are wildly impractical for ship-work, of course, and even for funerary art purposes, I wouldn’t think to dress so finely. But I liked it, really! There was a lot to like about putting on my glad rags and getting dolled up to the nines.”

Mostly just how it looked, but you suppose that’s always mattered rather all-consumingly to you.

You hesitate over the next bit.

“What if I can’t just forget it and move on? And I’m just apocalyptically ill-suited to this life in some deep psychologically-traumatized way that I don’t even understand, like Dirk seems to sort of think I am, and I can’t ever make any headway in my long-term project of self improvement, and also I can’t do this whole distraction thing at all because I’m so preoccupied with my own ridiculous straits and attempts to divorce myself from the past? I mean, it’s not supposed to be _about me_! But I make everything about me, and I can’t stop!”

“Okay,” Aradia says, rather straightforwardly. “What if you didn’t try to cut it all out completely?”

“That won’t work at all,” you sigh. “Dirk, and - I can’t even blame him, it’s everybody, just about everybody on your crew, with good reason as a result of all the double-crossing and backroom-dealing and almost-getting-you-murdered-for-my-own-selfish-purposes deal would really like to see me disown it altogether, and I can’t say I completely disagree as to the necessity of a clean break!”

“It’s not a clean break, though, if it’s this agonizing,” she explains. “Have you ever treated gangrene?”

“Huh? No? What’s that?”

“Heh. Sometimes I forget how new you are to this stuff! A deep tissue infection to a bad injury, a bacterial rot that builds up when you’re badly wounded or something’s been amputated, usually. But it can also set in for really small things, a little nick to the finger that you don’t wrap well enough, suddenly it’s all black and soft and gross.”

“Yikes, alright, well, consider me informed!”

“Problem with treatment is that when you try to amputate or scrape out the diseased tissue, sometimes you can reinfect it or spread the contagion. Especially if you’re not, well, a classically trained medic.” She grins illustratively at this part, and tugs up the hem of her skirt to show you a jagged scar that runs down from her knee. The tissue looks almost like a deep burn, bubbled and purple-black and uneven, practically covering the anterior aspect of her lower leg.

You raise your eyebrows as high as they naturally go.

“I did my best with this, back when I first got it, which was… not very good! My best was sort of binding it to something stationary and trying to keep it clean. Obviously it got pretty badly infected anyway, on account of being stuck in the hold of a slaving ship. Itches and hurts like you wouldn’t believe. But there’s a treatment protocol in pretty hopeless cases like this one, though I didn’t know about it at the time. You tie it up and let it ‘stew in its own juices’.”

“Ech, that doesn’t sound very medical,” you say, recoiling slightly, though she only laughs.

“Bodies are tough, Jake, is the point! Sometimes by trying to help things along, you make it worse, move things around when it’s too early, force the poison into the bloodstream or the surrounding tissue before your body can handle it… I’m just saying. Sometimes it’ll heal better if you don’t touch it.”

“A little too late on that,” you huff. “I’m still doing this mission-y thing.”

“I’m not saying you shouldn’t! Just that maybe it’ll sort itself out on its own without trying to excise it completely? I mean, don’t you think some of who you were might be useful to keep?”

“Hasn’t been so far,” you say, staring gloomily into the dark waters of the canal.

“I can’t really weigh in on a lot of it, but your shooting, I mean, you didn’t learn that from us! This whole thing with the Amporas, none of us could pull it off without your specific expertise! Basically everything we’ve ever bonded over was based on your interests from before, and I loved getting to know you on the way out to Aetria! I’m not saying… I don’t know, ‘bring back old Jake’, since that guy did _definitely_ violate the sanctity of our corpse-bro-ship and almost get me and everyone I love massacred, which was kind of shitty. Just that you can take your time picking and choosing what you want to be like, what you want to keep doing!”

You chuckle a bit nervously at her bringing _that_ up, though you suppose it’s a fair point.

“Well, it’s kind of you to say, I s’pose,” you reply, after a long moment, as a gondolier pulls up and you begin to shuffle your bags into the boat. “I’m really glad you’re coming with, at very least.”

“If you hadn’t gone to bat for me I would’ve just had to break some kneecaps to get on the quest,” she laughs. “Wouldn’t miss it for the world!”

Arriving at the bookshop, which you recognize even from the canal by its grey-black repurposed ship-timber facade, you find that it takes on a somewhat more daunting silhouette from below. You help Aradia out onto the cobblestone walkway as you both carry up literal sacks of heavy fabric and pass the driver what seems to be an adequate number of coins.

She takes lead entering the bookstore, calling for Mr. Zahhak as you stack your parcels in an alcove near the door and have a look around. It’s a lovely, meticulously neat shop, crammed to the gills with little gadgets and trinkets and walls and walls of packed-full bookshelves.

When you find her, she’s chatting with the proprietor, who looks rather phenomenally uncomfortable from behind a little pair of dark glasses. He’s even bigger than you remember, just an utter mountain of a man, and Aradia is about the size of a kitten in comparison, though she doesn’t seem to either notice or care.

“Mister Zahhak!” she announces, with utter delight. “This is my friend Jake! He was with me when I came through the other day. I bet you’ll love him, he reads ands writes and translates. We’re looking for anything you’ve got on the Amporas, Dersian formal custom, or… actually, has anything turned up in Aetrian or about Aetria?”

He doesn’t have anything on the Aetrian front, which is too bad. Maybe you’ll be able to write something for Dirk, and then do a translation, give him something to work with. You sort of doubt he’d have the patience to just sit through an afternoon of verb conjugations; he would almost certainly do so for your benefit if you asked, but it would be a rather cruel exercise to inflict on him, like locking an energetic dog in a crate for a day.

Still, you pile up an armful of texts, including one limited-print novel that apparently deals with the nuances of a Dersian lady’s adventures in court, one encyclopedia with a healthy set of entries on Derse and its culture, and some kind of incredibly old lineage-tracing text with hundreds of pages of information about the heritage of assorted noble families.

He tries to give them all to Aradia for free. She politely refuses; the encyclopedia and the geneology, at least, you can sit down and read in the shop. You purchase the novel with great enthusiasm, accept the encyclopedia, and lay on the immaculate, carpeted floor to start to read as Aradia settles in beside you to do the same.

It is frightfully dull, and not especially helpful, either. You learn quite a bit about rigid social stratification and generally that formality and adherence to custom are prized, but that doesn’t tell you a damn thing about which fork to use at the dinner table.

Perhaps you shouldn’t know, should be a hopeless wreck of a prince, which is technically true, but you really don’t want to bring any kind of undue suspicion to the operation, and you are getting rather frustrated by the prospect of doing exactly that when it turns out their nobles hold their wine glasses with their toes or somesuch nonsense.

Hopefully the novel will be more helpful, but for now you are making quiet, perturbed noises of frustration.

“Well, he’s definitely seventy-six,” Aradia notes, closing her own book. “How’s it going with yours?”

“Rather horribly,” you sigh. “It assumes a preexisting level of knowledge with convention that I somewhat glaringly lack. D’you - could you fill me in, do you think, on what the difference between a proper and improper greeting is? Apparently I could be dueled to the death for failing to distinguish between the two, though this damned tome has neglected to inform me which is which!”

“Excuse me, sir?” she calls off towards the backroom door into which Mr. Zahhak disappeared. “Would you be willing to model a greeting to a higher caste member for my friend? Also the inverse, if you wouldn’t mind, he’s very curious about Dersian social niceties!”

This turns out to be a very good way to obtain an almost shocking amount of information all at once. Horuss Zahhak considers himself a much-vaunted expert in the matter, and he is only too delighted to walk you through every question you have, from dining to hand-shaking to what the devil a Dersian noble’s bow ought to look like. Not yours, it turns out.

Aradia has a great deal of fun watching you try to perfectly ape his gestures. You learn quickly, but you still look more than a little ridiculous in the process, before you get the hang of it and can start freestyling a bit, putting your own twist on things.

With some explanation of the situation, he begins to offer strategic advice, as well. He’s never met Dualscar, but he knows of him, in stories and whispers passed during his time in the navy. A man of great power and greater reputation, in his heyday. Now widely thought to be dead, though the rumors remain. Stories of shocking depravity and more shocking sadism. A backstory drenched in blood, built on human flesh, the trafficking of his own countrypeople, the near-genocide of others who would have opposed him.

“I had recently enlisted when news of his death spread through the ranks,” he notes. “I would prefer not to repeat the stories shared, then, in mixed company.”

He glances meaningfully at Aradia, who pouts and protests that no fun is allowed.

You don’t think it sounds very fun.

“So what would you do, then? Supplicate, or challenge him?” you ask.

“That would depend on your objective, I would assume.”

“I’m a distraction!” you say, rather proudly.

“Well, little would distract a man such as this one more than an entity outside of his… absolute dominion,” Mr. Zahhak says, mopping at his brow with the back of his hand.

You feel a pang of sympathy with and concern for Kanaya. And perhaps a little bit more understanding, even, of the circumstances that led her here. To combat such a foe, to _win_ \- and now to defeat him twice!

“Well, I’ll learn how to do either, then,” you say. “For greater flexibility. I do believe that I… well, technically I would outrank him, regardless of what position Jane might be tempting him with.”

It does unsettle your stomach, the thought of her even meeting with such a character. Janey is sharp as a tack, twice as quick to get to the point, a talented and ruthless diplomat in the negotiating room and no slouch when things come to blows outside of it, but if half of what Mr. Zahhak is alluding to is true, you’re almost overwhelmed with concern for her. And she isn’t even there yet!

The wave of nausea only strengthens your resolve, and you continue to scan through the encyclopedia and reevaluate what you’ve read with the proprietor’s context.

You’ll have to speak more to Kanaya on the subject, as sore as it might be. To get a better sense of how to approach this.

After a time, though, the shop door swings open, and you turn on your heel to see Dirk, his fingers a little ink-stained but otherwise no worse for wear for his afternoon in the tavern. You smile gratefully over the cover of the dusty encyclopedia in your arms, then sneeze.

It is horrible to sneeze when one’s face is as full of metal as yours is, and both Dirk and Aradia have the utter gall to _laugh_ when you jingle and sniff in displeasure.

“I have allergies,” you complain, pouting.

“I have an excuse to get out of here,” he parries. “Unless you’re in the middle of something?”

You glance up at Mr. Zahhak - he’s got a few inches even on you - and he shrugs amiably.

“Return whenever you like with more questions,” he suggests.

“You crazy kids have fun!” Aradia adds. “I’m going to bug Mister Zahhak about medical textbooks, anyway. If you thought the encyclopedia was dry, wait till you hear about four humors theory!”

“Alright, then!” you announce, excited to have an excuse to see the sun again, having been cooped up in various shops for the vast majority of the last few hours. “Can you handle the parcels?”

“I’ll be honored to be of assistance,” the shopkeeper insists, and you take him and Aradia at their words and eagerly follow Dirk out into the Court.

“I’m actually getting used to the smell!” you declare with great pride.

“I’d hope so. It’d be a pretty miserable place to be if you hadn’t,” he laughs. “Fruitful shopping expedition? Sorry I couldn’t tag along.”

“Yes, as a matter of fact. We got everything on the list! And Mister Zahhak is an incredible resource on etiquette and conventions. I’ll almost certainly be returning to his shop once I have the chance. Possibly just to pester him, he’s a terribly funny fellow. How was your, er, jam session or whatever with Kanaya?”

“It… was.” He rakes a hand through his hair, a telltale sign that he is doing a bit of withholding.

“I’ve been meaning to ask, is there some reason for the tension between the two of you?”

“...not really? I have a lot of, well, professional respect for her.”

“I should say! Having learned a bit more about this Dualscar character, it must have required a real fist of steel to take down his dastardly enterprise.”

He leans against the wooden facade of the bookshop, the set of his mouth shifting as he thinks.

“Well, yeah, obviously,” he says. “That’s not my hangup, or her hangup with me. We have some opposing thoughts about how much of a hand in governance people who aren’t the Queen ought to have in the Court. Her opinion seems to lean towards ‘limitless’, specifically when it comes to _her_ , personally, which, like, fair, I’d almost definitely want the same level of pull if I was in literally any position to tell Terezi to do ‘jack’ or ‘squat’ without getting bitten or something. I mean. Pretty sure eighty percent of the issue is the fact that _I’d_ abuse it relentlessly, and it’s kind of hard for me to believe that even Actual Saint Kanaya Maryam wouldn’t do the same thing if it came down to it. Actually, shit, she’s immortal, ever think about that? Because I’ve started _thinking about it_ , recently, and it’s really just courtesy stopping her from taking over this entire place. So what happens when the courtesy runs out, yknow?”

“Oh,” you say, a little surprised. “Wow, you sure _do_ have an internal monologue!”

“...was that a question you had?” he laughs. “Well, yeah, I think about a lot of shit, constantly, often to my own detriment, what else is new?”

A sea breeze passes over the canal, and you happily inhale the comparatively inoffensive scent of salt and ocean.

“I don’t know,” you admit. “I suppose that all makes sense.”

“Well, yeah. We’ve both got our own flavor of control issue. She just happens to really dislike it when people, especially people whose conduct she thinks edges towards reprehensible, apply reasonable skepticism to her motives and general virtuousness. Which is, again, totally fair. Shit, if I was her I definitely would’ve gutted me by now, so I guess I should be grateful for my functioning, still-on-the-inside bowel system.”

“I’m certainly grateful for it!” you say brightly, filing all of that information away for later consideration and taking his hand. “Now, what was the errand we were going to partake in as an alternative to dusty bookshops?”

Smiling fondly, he stands and stretches his shoulders, arms, and back before continuing. You watch him with just as substantial if not greater fondness. It really is a little like having a very meticulous pet, everything about him just-so, deliberately maintained in the most ineffable of ways.

“Heard you and Aradia went on a tour of the bathhouse over yonder. Want to try out a new one with me? It’s just a little out of our way, kind of on the route back to _Starlight’s End_.”

“Lead on, dearest!”

He does, and you follow him up to the catwalks overhead, once again on a winding path through the attics and over the roofs of the Velvet Court. Apparently, he’s been having much the same thoughts that you have, trying to perform a threat-assessment on the aged aristocrat you intend to murder and rob. Kanaya has lent him a book of firsthand accounts she’s collected, which should be even more useful than Horuss Zahhak’s half-remembered gossip. According to Dirk, it’s also a hell of a lot more disturbing.

“Yeah, I feel gross just reading about it, honestly. S’part of why I try not to be too much of a dick about it. She’s seen a lot,” he admits. “Her own account is obviously missing, but from the rest…”

“Cripes, bad news bears,” you agree.

“Exactly. I’m not planning on leaving your side for a second in there. S’non-negotiable at this point.”

“I can’t say I mind,” you parry, trying to make eye contact with him while walking so you can wink. Unfortunately, something to do with his ‘cardio’, perhaps, you’re rather hopelessly behind in your sojourn, though you endeavor to catch up. “But look, now, I do have to stand on my own occasionally, you realize.”

“He’s a _really_ bad guy, Jake.”

“Dirk,” you say shortly. “Think for a second and a half. Don’t you imagine I’ve known my fair share of _bad guys_?”

“You thought I was one of ‘em, dude.”

“Well, you’ve done an awful lot of murdering and you did even more _threatening_ to do so, I think that misapprehension of your character can be forgiven,” you sniff. “All I’m saying is that I’m familiar with his sort, and I’m not some naive little newborn baby when it comes to dealing with them, alright?”

Dirk winces as though your words have inflicted physical pain, but you stay firm, cross your arms resolutely. In truth, you’re far more concerned with holding to a believable princely role in the process than you are about _your_ prospects for making it out of this unscathed. You are a difficult man to scathe, at least in certain very specific contexts, and Kanaya has as good as confirmed that you’d be able to get a handle on things in that respect if it came down to it, much as the thought inexplicably turns your stomach.

“Yeah, that definitely doesn’t make me feel better. Let’s just not let it go anywhere near there,” he finally says, and you nod agreeably.

“That’s the goal! Keep it over the table until the murder bit.”

He puts his hand on your shoulder for a moment and continues the walk, mostly in silence, now.

“I’d be a lot more comfortable with all of this if we could actually talk about teaching you how to defend yourself,” he adds, as you pass through what looks like a graveyard for broken swords.

“We can talk about it,” you say quietly. “It just makes me nervous is all.”

“Seriously?” He nearly stops short again. “Last time -”

“I wasn’t in a good place for it. It happens! But I - I want to be better about talking to you, so if you want to talk, we can talk,” you say. “Just, I worry that you won’t much like the answers. We can _talk_. But I don’t - I don’t want to have that on my shoulders, Dirk.”

“...muscle? You don’t want muscle on your shoulders?”

“No, you ass,” you laugh. “I mean, it’s just much better if you all expect nothing of me in that regard. Even the shooting thing, which I can admit I’m objectively rather excellent at, it’s - it’s not something you ought to rely on. I already know how I am in a crisis. I have a fallback, and it’s not… that. And if you get to the point where you _expect_ that I’ll do anything other than… roll over for self preservation, effectively, you’re going to be disappointed and possibly murdered in the process of your mistaken confidence in me and it will all go emphatically sideways and possibly ass-backwards and everyone I love will die horribly and I’ll have nothing and also probably die, I really think consumption is the greatest likelihood, or else I’ll die of grief or something which is a very legitimate literary cause of death and -”

“So this-all struck a nerve,” Dirk interrupts as you begin to hyperventilate.

“You think?” you choke, trying to laugh, failing horribly.

He ushers you down a neat set of whitewashed concrete steps, and you grip his arm until you feel your shaking hands are steadied by it. Breathing through your ridiculous, mindless panic. Horrible. This is exactly what you were supposed to avoid, what was never supposed to be an issue, practically why mother shuffled you off into service in the first place, it’s just - you’re just - _so bad at this_.

“It’s okay. I get it,” he says, his tone low, as he opens a heavy door, gesturing you into a somewhat nondescript stone building, delightfully warm inside after the chilly walk. You wonder if he does ‘get it’. Try not to just assume that he doesn’t. Dirk can do a lot of things that seem unfathomable to you.

As you stand a little awkwardly in the corner, glasses fogged, out of place, he summons up an attendant, lays down a few crowns, and the two of you are led off to yet another steamy room in a hall of such rooms, handed a pair of fluffy white towels, and left alone.

It’s quite a small space, cozy but pleasant with two people, probably couldn’t fit many more. A little door leads off to a public pool, and a quick glance out reveals that, at this one, people do not wear underclothes. A pair of buckets of cold water sit on a set of wooden step-like seats, and a brazier heats the space.

“This is a sort of modified sauna,” he explains, seeing your confusion. “Don’t have ‘em in Aetria?”

“No, not to my knowledge. Big on the indoor plumbing, less big on the whatever-this-is.”

A dry heat emanates from the brazier, which is quite pleasant. Dirk fiddles with it slightly, heating and drying the room in equal measure.

“So, ah, what ought we to do?” you ask.

“The point is basically to sweat in the steam, raise your body temperature, dunk in the cold pool, and then come back and do it again. People have business transactions in them, meetings, catch up, it’s a northern-ish social custom, but kind of a good time. Supposed to be pretty healthy. Filter out all those toxins.”

“I mean, clothes off?”

He laughs. “Don’t have to, but it’s recommended.”

You don’t need to be told twice. Dirk takes a couple of cakes of soap from his sleeve as he undresses, tucking his clothing up in an overhead shelf, where you set yours as well. Following his suit, you spread your towel over the bench.

“I realize,” he says, as you’re getting yourself settled in, “this is kind of antithetical to the abstinence movement that I’ve recently gotten onboard with.”

“You think?” you snort. “Sincerely, I find it hard to believe that this is accidental.”

“Maybe I just trust my ability to be way more conversationally interesting than my rockin’ bod.”

He’s sitting close enough to the flickering orangey light emanating from the coals of the fire, the contours of his body already glistening with steam, that the moment you take to give him a good once-over turns into several. In the soft shadows cast by and over his musculature, the stark lines of his face, he looks like a creature of divine, mythic augury, dark and dangerous and otherworldly.

“I don’t believe they’ve invented a more captivating _anything_ yet, though by all means, do your best,” you laugh.

In these quarters, you can rather easily wink without his evading it, and he makes a sad, strangled kind of noise, which contrasts with the image he’s projecting rather adorably.

“I, uh, really appreciated your asking about me and Kanaya,” he says, pouring some water from one of the buckets on the brazier, sending a plume of steam rolling through the chamber.

“No problemo!” you say, smiling, still reveling in the warmth of the sauna. “I should ask about you more. It’s a project of mine! To, you know, try to assume that people have inner lives and whatnot rather than being all surprised whenever I’m reminded.”

He snorts, but doesn’t laugh in earnest, which is kind of as much as you could’ve asked for. You sigh in response, slumping slightly against the slats of bare wood behind you.

“Is there anything that you, uh. Think I _should_ ask about?” you suggest, hesitantly. “I really do want to know, y’know. Everything about you, basically. It’s the most interesting topic I can think of.”

“You’ve got the cliffsnotes,” he laughs.

“What _are_ your ambitions? Since we were talking politics, is - do you want to get some kind of foothold in the Court?”

“I’d rather eat a live snake,” he says thoughtfully, tapping his jaw as though he’s considering it. “No. _Two_ live snakes. Make ‘em adders. That’s how I feel about that level of civil responsibility, as though anything the Court gets up to could be described as ‘civil’.”

“Really? You… I don’t know, I’d sort of assumed…”

“What, that I’m in it to be a power player? Nah. Ain’t my bag. Like. That’s on purpose, obviously, I just… avoid it, where I can. Don’t have designs on captaincy, or really anything that puts me too… in charge of other people. It’s kind of a minefield for me. I’ve outgrown a lot of stupid shit, but that doesn’t mean it’s not still _there_. That an enlightening bit of insight?”

“I don’t think you need to be so careful,” you say, leaning over to kiss his bare shoulder, right on Rambo’s forehead.

“Yeah, I really do.”

“You’ve taken very good care of me. Better than probably anyone, ever,” you argue, frowning up at him. “Just my two cents, dear heart, but I’ve never met someone more aggressively _ethical_ about their interactions with the people around them. Be it a murky grey sort of ethics as it may, you’re quite rigid about it.”

“Again, on purpose, dude. It’s like trying to judge what someone’d be like drunk when they’re sober. S’hard to guess. Because they’re different states. And… yeah.”

You sigh. “You’re very hard on yourself, Dirk.”

“You’re one to talk.”

“Well, I’ll reserve judgement. I’m just thinking, I mean. Throwing ideas around.”

“I was kind of a shitty older brother way back when, and I sincerely only got shittier with that sort of dynamic until I wound up on the Diamond. Trust me, you’re getting the best possible version. Maybe actually _the_ best. I don’t know.”

“Hold up, now, you had a little sibling? You never mentioned that.”

“Not something I think about a lot. Hope the little dude’s doing well, wherever he ended up. But it wasn’t anything I take a lot of pride in, how I was. At that. Well. That point in things, y’know? I’m really happy, here. Shit’s insanely good. You know it wasn’t always that way. I just still remember and kinda have to deal with that face of myself, alright?”

“No, I’m sorry, I was just thinking we could have bonded over it! What a thing to have in common and not _know_. Particularly since you have such profound older brother energy.”

“It’s kind of strange to think of you as an older sibling, having met - I mean, sorry, don’t mean to start chucking rocks at a glass -”

“No, no, toss away, underhand, overhand, this glass thingamajig or whatever your analogy of choice might have been is about as stalwart as a mighty oak!”

“Let’s not test that.” Dirk laughs quietly, the sound echoing in the semi-darkness of the sauna. “It’s a stupid observation. Every family’s different, and fuck knows I don’t have any kind of bead on Aetrian culture beyond pretty basal observations and a few comments you’ve made that’ve, uh, stuck.”

“That’s a bit of a tragedy then, I’m hardly the best ambassador of Aetrian anything,” you sigh ruefully. “But despite the whole gender component to things, there’s still a certain gravity attributed to the role of eldest sibling, y’know, in theory. We were awful close in age, of course, so much so that it didn’t really matter beyond the aesthetics of it, but I liked the _idea_ , at least. For quite a long time, we were each others’ closest friends and confidants, I’ll have you know, it wasn’t always a mess!”

He leans inward, his face lit up with the orange glow of the flickering coals as he thinks, his face resting against his hands, formed into fists and propped up on his bare thighs. You can’t help but admired the contours of his musculature, made so stark by the single-source warm light.

“It’s harder when it’s family,” he finally says.

“I wouldn’t - it’s not -” you begin to argue, then stop yourself when you realize you’re not entirely sure why you’re so very defensive on this subject. Well, there’s a long list of flagrantly obvious reasons, none of which should matter all that much in this context. Aren’t you better equipped than anyone to recognize that family is a complicated and often challenging topic? Of course you are.

Exhaling shortly in frustration, more with yourself than anything, you splash some of the cold water from your pail over your face, sighing in relief; it’s getting rather warm. Reaching over for one of the abandoned cakes of simple white soap, which must be the jasmine stuff he’s smelled like for the last two days, you gently lather up your face, focusing on your piercings, which are getting rather warm as you sit by the smouldering brazier.

You can feel Dirk watching you as you splash a little more water on, rinse around them, rolling each one between your fingertips to ensure it’s sitting properly with no adjustments or additional cleaning needed, that everything feels in order.

“I’d offer to help, but…” he trails off, his chest shaking with a suppressed laugh.

“Scoundrel,” you say accusingly, though your lips twist into a smile. When you aren’t thinking about them, it’s as though they aren’t there, but his scrutiny makes you acutely aware of the way the metal pulls and catches in your mouth when you swallow.

“It’s been said. Hey. Can I ask something kind of dumb?”

“Have you not been doing so freely? No, I jest, go ahead.”

“I hate you. Anyway, why d’you keep them? Like, force of habit, do they mean something to you?”

“Well. That’s not a stupid question,” you say slowly, actually mulling it over before you respond. “It’s… well, they, they have significance. Letting any of them close up would be… strange. I rarely remove them at all, unless it’s by request. So habit, yes. Also significance, in a broad cultural sense, and… I like them? I like having things.”

“Oh. Cool.”

“I used to take them out on occasion, when I was younger, but if the flesh gets a mind to knit itself back together it winds up a lot more trouble than it’s worth,” you explain. “Unless you can manage it yourself, y’know, just jam the bastards back through, it’s a whole production. There’s a lot of rather archaic ritual surrounding piercing as an artistic practice. Hasn’t actually mattered since the Gods died, but the temples sure do make an effort to keep up appearances.”

“Sounds kind of horrible, I’m gonna be real with you.”

“Eh, not especially. Just kind of a drag. Really boring to sit through the whole devotional rigamarole when all you really need is an awl and a can-do attitude, that’s my thinking on it.”

“Don’t get me started on sitting through rituals. Best shit about piracy. Don’t gotta kneel unless I’m feeling it.”

“You’re an awful tease,” you sigh, drying your face on the towel and picking up the pail to splash a good portion of it on yourself, down your front and back.

“Never heard _that_ one before,” he snorts. “Wow, breaking new ground on my character, here. Model of purity and restraint. Dirk Strider, naive storybook ingenue. Waiting on a promise ring before anyone gets so much as a _look_ at my immaculate asshole, my spotless and unsullied -”

“Must you riff?”

“I will literally die if I don’t riff.”

“Right-o, carry on then,” you chuckle, briefly looking away as you search for the soap and wind up distracted by the shadows dancing on the wood-panelled walls of the little room.

It wound up next to your thigh at some point, and you pick it up and get to work on your neck and chest and shoulders. Based on the drainage slats in the floor, you’re pretty sure this isn’t an inappropriate place to be washing, and the worst thing you can imagine would be to be both sweaty _and_ dock-filth-Court-grimey.

You pause at your arms when you register that Dirk has lost whatever mental battle is raging in there and is watching you again.

“Swear I’m not trying to seduce you right now,” you sigh, to help ease the tension. “Just hate being _gross_ , alright?”

“Regardless. I think I need to go jump in the cold pool.”

“One second and I’ll gladly join you,” you laugh, dumping a fraction of the bucket’s contents over yourself and shaking out your hair as you stand. “Go on, last one in’s a rotten egg.”

Dirk chivalrously holds the door for you, and for his troubles, he is the rotten egg. The water is shallow enough to stand in, so after a moment’s hesitation, you step in via the concrete steps. It’s a dark chamber, lit from torches of some sort in sconces set in the walls, and in a second, Dirk is actually _leaping_ into the water to join you, splashing you thoroughly.

It’s incredibly cold, but you’re so warm from the sauna that it just feels _nice_ , and you splash him back. There are only a few other people in the shadowy, cavernous room, so it still has a sort of private feel to it.

He swims up to you, the water barely chest-deep, and puts his head on your shoulder, your bodies flush together as though you may begin to slow dance or something. He’s still warm, even after a few seconds in the pool. You hold him close, just breathing.

“I love you,” he says softly.

“I love you too,” you reply, wrapping your arms around him with great reverence and then upending the both of you into the water, knocking him off balance.

There’s always that second where your head goes under where you really think you’re going to die this time. It’s happened before; you died twice before the Black Diamond fished you out of the debris. Once when the ship exploded, and again when you revived underwater, couldn’t find your way back to the surface, and drowned.

Holding Dirk close, you stave off the panic. He’s saved you before, and he hauls you up again, sputtering and huffing with indignity.

You’re still laughing over the bit of japery when you shepherd him back to the door you left open, lock it behind you, and scoot in to sit beside him on his towel.

To his credit, he’s really trying to keep his focus on your face, but he keeps glancing down to your nipples. You’re _sure_ he thinks he isn’t being conspicuous.

“Can I kiss you?” you ask, and now you have his eyes on yours, searching, skeptical but full of pained affection.

He nods as though he doesn’t trust himself to answer in words, and that’s more than good enough for you. You grasp his face gently by the jaw, feeling the bone beneath your fingertips but not digging in, and turn about in place, leaning over to meet his mouth with yours. There is not an ounce of chastity to it; in seconds, you’re hungrily pressing past his lips, searching out the tip of his tongue with your own, tangling your fingers in his hair and barely keeping yourself propped up in an effort to get your body as close to his as possible.

Shouldering him back against the hot, dry wood of the bench behind him, you let your free hand wander over his neck, his clavicles, the swell of muscle that forms his pectoral and the ridges of his uncommonly-well-developed serratus, running down his side. It’s fortunate that you’re still rather actively kissing him, because otherwise you’d smile a bit puckishly at the way he tenses and shudders beneath even this delicate touch.

Panting, he breaks away, pausing with his forehead resting against yours, puts his hand on your shoulder, gives you the slightest squeeze, and murmurs “ _fuck_ , gotta stop, sorry.”

You scootch away willingly, giving him space, but you pout through it. You were having _fun_.

“Already? Let the record show, I’m not even -” you begin to announce.

“Fucking hell, first of all, _I’m_ getting worked up, second of all, I’m not accepting your lack of a boner as evidence that this isn’t a fucked up thing to be doing, on the basis that there’s no way you haven’t hacked _that_ physiological response, too, because your complete disregard for your biological restrictions is both boundless and terrifying, alright?”

“Remind me, dearest, _why_ it’s so important that we keep things chaste?” you sigh, figuring you’re not going to win arguing any of those assertions.

“My _dowry_ , English,” he retorts, though his voice is just as low and syrupy-thick as yours, now that he’s come off his riff, if not more so, much to your relief. “If I’m going to get a really sicknasty warhorse out of the marital deal someday, gotta maintain my virtue.”

“All jokes aside, you damned minx,” you sigh. “I want you.”

“On the Gods, same, alright? It’s just complicated. Really complicated.”

“I know.”

“Do you?” he asks, sincere curiosity suddenly suffusing his tone, overtaking the suppressed want. “I don’t know. Hard to shake the sense that we’re on different pages of basically every book, lately. And in general, I guess, with the benefit of hindsight and a few rounds of morbid gondola-self-reflection.”

That’s something you understand, as it pertains to Dirk. Whenever you spend a lot of time with him, it comes into stark relief, just how much of his time he spends… thinking. About his friends, about himself, about his mysterious past, maybe about particularly tasty meals he has experienced or something to that effect, you’re not completely certain.

You suppose that you can relate to that kind of a lot. You live most comfortably inside your head. Though it is a little mind-boggling to imagine that he needs refuge from his life and from the actual heaps of people who adore him.

“Uh. I get that. I don’t think I’d trust me either,” you say, pausing after a moment’s thought. He tries to interrupt, here, but you cut him off before he can really get into it. “Hup-up-up, put a sock in it, let me finish, I’m not saying that you don’t trust me! Er, I guess I sort of am alluding to that, but I’m trying to explain, alright?”

He nods, the set of his mouth tightening, shifting the shadows cast by the glow emanating from beneath his face, and mimes sewing his lips closed and tossing away the needle and scissors after.

“You’re right,” you continue, once you’ve bit back a chuckle. “The way things worked before, sort of, is the only way I really know, and it’s not right for this sort of life. I’ve picked up plenty of unsavory habits, and it’s not just that they don’t suit you. They don’t suit me either.”

That seems like kind of an intense thing to say, and you crack a rueful smile to ease it a little, opening your palms and splaying out your hands, which are fine and steady. So you’re pretty sure you aren’t lying, and in the light of the brazier, there should be no reason for Dirk to disbelieve you, either.

He exhales heavily, though. His expression is just kind of tired.

“You’re like some kind of a reverse-politician, I swear to fuck. How do you manage to spin literally everything that’s ever happened to you into your fault?”

“Hey now, that’s a little below the belt.”

“It’s kind of true, though.”

“And so what? I can’t fix what’s not _mine_ ,” you insist, crossing your arms. “You get that, right? Just hand-waving everything as the product of circumstance, that’s - that’s just… admitting to my own… helplessness. It has to be something I can fix, eventually, if I dig at it for long enough. Don’t you understand? If it’s me that’s the problem, I can change it.”

“That’s also a really easy way to drive yourself insane, dude. Trust me on that. It’s a familiar dysfunction, s’all I’m saying. Sometimes there’s nothing you can do. Specially when you’re a fuckin’ kid. Like, I’m talking about myself, alright? Was it my fault no one went to bat for me when I was trying to reverse-engineer manliness as an abstract concept as a dipshit eight year old?”

“Obviously not,” you say patiently, well and truly used to his occasional digressions into abstract and typically irrelevant hypotheticals.

“No, fuck, you’re not… you’re not hearing me.”

“I hear you just fine, actually! You were a child. Children rarely if ever wield any kind of social power, let alone the means to leverage it if they did. It would be callous and unfair to treat just about anything happening to a child as their fault, what with the rather extreme vulnerability that the state confers. We’ve had this one out before, actually.”

“Okay. So. I… hear you, saying words. And I just want to clarify, for the sake of argument, whether you realize that you were _also_ , at one point, a child. Just to be totally clear.”

“No, Dirk, I was never a child, I emerged from mother’s skull fully-formed and my father was a randy winged snake-deity,” you say flatly, then snort. “Come off it, I’m not talking about anything that happened _then_. I had a lovely childhood! Really much better than anyone deserves. It’s actually rather ridiculous, hearing about - I mean, you, and Aradia, and Kanaya, and Roxy. Wasn’t Karkat orphaned too? Basically everyone I’ve met since leaving Aetria has endured some series of horrible traumas, largely before even coming of age.”

“Yeah,” he sighs, pressing the heel of his hand to his forehead as though this is all causing him grievous pain. “That’s not… technically incorrect. Fucking christ, you’re kind of impossible to argue with.”

“Aw, thanks!” you reply, with a non-negligible level of sincerity. “It’s a long-cultivated skill.”

That feels surprisingly good to say, which in itself has you stopped quite thoroughly in your figurative tracks. You’ve been afraid of him figuring out that it was on purpose, how you are, for fear of a wide variety of catastrophic potential outcomes.

But he just laughs quietly and looks up with a slight smile. “Thank fuck you’re on my side.”

You really are. That _is_ a subtle but increasingly non-negligible paradigm shift. It is you and him and sometimes a few choice, special-reserve, top-tier pals against the whole entire world, and what a thing that is! He’s not looking to pick you apart until you don’t suit him anymore and he has an excuse to shuffle you off somewhere else and never speak to you again. Almost definitely not trying to do that. And it is always a good time to remind yourself of that fact.

“Yes,” you agree, leaning over to give him a peck on the cheek. “We are romantically in cahoots, and also generally in cahoots, so don’t you forget it.”

“Easier to appreciate maladaptive coping mechanisms when they serve my criminal purposes, I guess,” he concedes.

“Now you’re getting the hang of it!” you laugh.

You make another foray towards snuggling up with him again, since he’s cool and his body is slick and pleasantly tactile in the baking-hot room, but you let him steer rather than let anything get away from you. And he’s content to kiss you gently, to touch his cheek to yours, and then to sigh and usher you away so he can actually wash himself before he dies of heatstroke.

“I don’t actually know a lot about your childhood,” he adds, as though he’s still a bit caught up in your previous conversation, even as he lathers up all businesslike and splashes himself with water. “For something so hypothetically idyllic, you kind of don’t talk about it. Ever. I guess that’s what gets to me about the whole deal. I can’t really believe you when you act like you just tripped on a loose paving stone and fell and wound up… where you are, alright?”

“Well. That’s not precisely what I’m trying to suggest. I don’t really know what I’m saying, so I hope you’ll do me a solid and not take it too literally. I mean. This conversation isn’t occurring in my first language! Look, Dirk, how many tutors pulled their hair out over _your_ linguistic development on a full-time basis for your formative years?”

“Admittedly, that’d be a goose egg. Zero. Zilch. Self-taught over here.”

“And how many horses did you independently possess?” you push. “I received my first when I was seven years old, I’ll have you know.”

“Fuck. Got me there,” he relents, shaking slightly-soapy water from his hair and showering you with more jasmine-scented droplets as you protest. “Also, remarkably effective subject-change. You _know_ I’m gonna ask about the horse.”

“I do,” you say, smiling as you wipe your face with the back of your hand. “Her name was Fala, after the storybook mare. I didn’t do especially well by her in the end, but she was an awfully good friend.”

“Hold on, hold on, paint me a word picture, I’m still gettin’ used to the fact that you existed as a seven year old. I was diggin’ the ‘divine birth’ explanation.”

“For my seventh birthday, I _pleaded_ for a horse of my own. Heh, I actually wrote out a formal request and stamped a seal on it and had it delivered to mother while she was on the throne making judgements, so she’d have to say _something_ on the matter, which she didn’t take all that kindly to, but… it worked. She was a swift little mare, still a filly when she was gifted to me. Friendly and tame as could be once she trusted you. Beautiful dapple-grey, barely taller than a pony, with a very nobly arched neck. Wouldn’t take a bit, but she learned to steer quickly with legs alone. I couldn’t force it into her mouth, you understand? It upset her terribly. She was soft-tongued, that wasn’t her fault, I _couldn’t_ hurt her that way.”

You’re a little lost in memories at the thought. More than a few people warned you about the potential hazard of not bit-training a horse, but mother actually sided with you, for once. Said you’d never learn responsibility if the trainers stepped in to fix your mistakes.

She was right, of course. You learned responsibility from it. Fala trained easily, hardly minded gunfire at all when you were riding her, took your command beautifully. Your _very own horse_ , no one else even got to touch her, since you were quite adamant about taking care of her yourself, despite how difficult it was to scrub the smell of the stables out of your hair once all was said and done.

That was true, appropriate princely stuff, horseback riding and shooting and all. Jane would come out with you on her own little mare for long rides about in the countryside, jaunting and picnicking and exploring, always home before dusk. It might have been the happiest time of your life, actually. You try to explain that to him, and you really think he’s trying to listen.

“Alright, that’s some _idyllic_ shit,” Dirk sighs. “Fine, candy-coated early years.”

“Haha, yes,” you say, pleasantly surprised by how this has gone.

“So she must be, what, twenty… one?”

Your heart sinks.

“No, ah, not really. She had to be - oh, what’s the word. Euthanized. Janey and I were to participate in a tournament, and it didn’t go so well. She’d never been around that many people all at once before, and I couldn’t - without a bit and bridle, there wasn’t any way to get her under control when she spooked. Cracked a few ribs myself, but she was rather more poorly off. Bit off more than I could chew, I s’pose. That’s some kind of lesson, isn’t it? I let the trainers handle my horses after that. Rather a ... bummer, sorry. But the first part’s a good story.”

You look down and twist your thumb ring about for something to do with your hands. It’s not an easy thing to tell anyone, something you’d kind of prefer to forget happened at all, unjust to Fala and yourself as that would be. You _learned_ something, and that is, itself, important to hold onto. It wouldn’t be fair to her otherwise, to just waste everything you got out of having known her.

“Fuck, dude, I’m sorry,” he says, pausing midway through a last perfunctory rinse, wide-eyed with concern, a sentiment that itches a bit uncomfortably.

“No need for that,” you protest. “You weren’t there, and I doubt you’d have made the same mistake. Fala’s soft mouth, my soft hand, match made in hell, really, but what can you do but learn?”

His hands are anything but soft as he pulls you partway into his arms. Just a sincere and proper hug, nothing more. You let him more-or-less cradle you, don't try to fight it or turn it into anything else. Nuzzle up against his shoulder a tad, but that's all.

“Tell me to fuck off if this is a totally stupid thing to say,” Dirk says softly, “but that wasn’t the only time something like that happened, was it.”

“No. Not really,” you say. “Sort of a running theme. Even with things I was good at, there were just as many I was just - hopeless with. One can shoot as well as one likes, but if he’s too nervous to do so from horseback, or before a proper crowd… I mean. Yes. You’re correct to make that… conjecture. Until I was consigned to devotional service, there wasn’t really anything I was just _good at_ , the first time, no fuckups.”

Perhaps your laughter is a bit anemic at the thought, but he politely doesn’t mention it or interrupt. You take the brief reprieve as an opportunity to wriggle away and pour the last of your water over the brazier before you try to continue.

“Anything higher stakes than a little tavern-room show-off, I _flinch_ , I always flinch. I don’t do well with… stakes, and pressure, and really even the thought that there might be either of those things. The more you have, the more you can lose! And I don’t - I can’t afford to lose anymore.”

The thing is, though, you’ve always felt this way. Maybe just because you’ve always had rather a great many _things_ relative to the average bear. So much to lose, right out of the gate. And you managed to lose everything you had the opportunity to lose, really. 

“I’m not going anywhere,” he says, with great certainty, steadiness, and you _want_ to believe him, you want it to be okay. For it to end with him, all of your nonsense.

“I’ll hold you to that,” you reply, your voice small and quiet in comparison.

“And I’m sorry if I’ve been pushing the - I’m still really thinking it over, how we’re going to make it tolerable, figuring out how to defend yourself. I don’t ever want you to be helpless. If something _did_ happen to me -”

“Let’s talk about this later,” you suggest, very much not wanting him to finish that sentence, and also glad to forget that he started it at all. ‘Never’, you figure, would also be an eminently viable option. “I mean. Let’s not ruin it, alright?”

“Alright,” he agrees reluctantly, seating himself back down on the bench, back to staring broodingly into the flames.

You cozy up a little closer, enjoying how all the steam now smells of jasmine, until your breath itself feels hot and you drag him back out to the pool to cool off again, and mostly forget about the unpleasant taste in your mouth, because you’re back to kissing him and he always tastes a little minty and a lot familiar and safe.

Drying off, redressing yourselves, you head back out into the cold, not a long walk for the tavern, which is just as well because it’s starting to get dark and cooling off even further. You travel arm-in-arm via the catwalks, and find a handful of crew members in the attic of _Starlight’s End_ , in the process of sorting through the ill-gotten goods previously left in storage to pack up in the catboat.

Downstairs, the mood is positively jubilant. Kanaya is the only one sitting in the corner with the manuscripts; Aradia has her guitar out and Roxy her shamisen, and they’re improvising off each others’ tunes with wild abandon. Dirk reluctantly lets go of your arm to greet Sollux, who seems in an uncharacteristically good mood, almost _excitedly_ announcing that he’s finished the course projections, and that he’ll be taking the next day off to not talk to any of you, which is fair.

“A week and a half?” Dirk enquires, squinting at the chart. “Confidence interval looks pretty high, dude.”

“Yeah, well, his numbers checked out.”

Sollux gestures off to the small crowd accumulated around the table, which is stocked liberally with tankards, glasses, and a whole roast bird. You hadn’t looked closely enough, it seems, because sidled up next to Vriska, the Wind King, in all of his suspiciously-nice yet entirely-unmatched pirate finery is waving over at you and Dirk, smiling broadly.

“Hey guys! Long time no sea!”

“Thanks for the navigation assist,” Dirk replies. “Anything else major on our collective agendas this evening?”

“Yeah, actually. A quest of the utmost importance,” John announces. “Getting hammered as fuck. Vriska and I are taking bets on how long it’ll take me! Can’t let all the liquor go to waste while you’re out saving the world.”

“The world, huh?” Dirk asks, pulling out a bench for you as you join him a little hesitantly at the table. “And here I thought this was a run-of-the-mill pillage mission.”

“You’re thinking pretty small, dude! Dave’s suuuper worked up about his dumb eye collection not accurately keeping track of this asshole, he’s basically never wrong, except… y’know, now! Ha ha, suck it, _Dave_! And to be fair, I sure didn’t catch onto any shenanigans, either, and usually that’s like my entire thing. So him and Rose are trying to be all fancy-shmancy academic philosopher-Kings in their little cave about the whole thing, which is _also_ dumb, since I figure the only way to actually get what’s going on sorted out is to send our favorite pirates in to handle the legwork! And man-oh-man, am I excited to see how this plays out. It gets sooo boring, always basically knowing how this stuff is going to end! Actually, credit where credit is due, Jake’s messed that up for us before, but this time he’s not double-dealing us, hopefully! Oh, but that’d be the wildest plot twist, right? I can’t wait.”

“We got Rose’s specs from him, too,” Vriska adds. “So we’re basically all set, once we finish stocking the ship. I was actually waaaaaaaay helpful in making it happen! It was _my_ idea to stop doing useless speculative math and summon John already.”

“See, this is why I like her! Math is stupid,” John agrees, throwing his arm over Vriska’s slender shoulders and half-hugging, half-lifting her like a ragdoll.

“Captain Serket, world-class problem solver,” Dirk snorts, leaning a little closer to you. “Okay, awesome, I was just wondering. I’ve got my own project to get rolling before we go.”

You glance over at him questioningly, and he’s smiling when you do.

“The guitar,” he adds. “What, did you think I forgot? Horses.”

If you hadn’t already been flushing for no reason throughout the whole conversation, particularly the mention of your own indiscretions, you would be now. To compensate, you hide your face in his shoulder.

“Awwwwwwww, you guys make me sick,” Vriska laughs.

“Good,” Dirk retorts, extricating himself from your arms with a kiss to your forehead. “It’s mutual. I’ll be right back, okay? Don’t start any barfights without me.”

Luckily, Nepeta takes the moment to offer to deal you into a card game, and you eagerly accept the ‘out’ rather than talking to Vriska and John on your own, which strikes you as perhaps the most uncomfortable way you can imagine to spend ten minutes, and in no time, you’re feeling a warm, familiar sort of inside-glow as Karkat curses and Equius pulls a victory out of thin air, which happens rarely enough that you’re actually a little proud on his behalf.

Dirk settles down beside you with an acrylic paint set and the guitar, and you only feel the slightest urge to snatch it into your lap and not let him take it back, and that’s quickly remedied by the part of your brain that isn’t a grabby-handed lunatic.

From the corner of your eye, you watch him sketch with a soft pencil, lining out delicate legs and arching necks and tapering snouts. He notices your surreptitious observation and adds a set of six-pack abs to one, which had previously appeared to be midway through an artful leap. 

You sputter and forget your place in the card game, and he laughs just as hard.

“I’m just improving the concept of horses,” he insists, as you make a face like you might be about to say something, then pout.

“Thank heavens you’re not a King,” you retort. “Y’know, I’m really starting to see it, the power-mad potential you’ve got.”

“Your artists were so preoccupied with whether they could -” he begins, dissolving back into laughter as you try to wrestle his pencil away from him. “Hey, I didn’t even give it biceps, yet! Hold out for the biceps, come on, it’ll totally sell you on my avant-garde artistic concept, _hey_ , don’t you dare play this dirty, English -”

By biting his neck, you’ve distracted him sufficiently to slip the pencil away from him, and he’s laughing too hard to try to retrieve it.

“Horses are serious business!” you insist, stretching away so he doesn’t just immediately muscle it back once he catches his breath.

“Pfft. Alright, alright, you got it,” he says, and you return his drawing implement with an indignant sniff. “‘M leaving it on the sketch, though.”

“ _Fine_ ,” you sigh, in fondness and exasperation both, turning back to where you’ve just decidedly lost the latest hand in your distraction.

More alcohol is poured, dinner is brought out; the staff of _Starlight's End_ are pulling out all the stops before closing, it seems, and you find it rather delightful. The bird is a goose, which is one of those you've never heard of, but it seems quite tasty. Someone's made a proper salad, with lots of different kinds of greens, nuts, and orange sections, lightly dressed with some kind of fruity-oily vinegar concoction.

Dirk continues to paint, you play a few more rounds of cards, and the music evolves and changes as Roxy and Aradia trade off at intervals to eat, then go all-in on a jam session, Roxy singing something in her native language as Aradia accompanies, trading off to a song you think you recognize of one of Aradia's creations.

“Hey, can I make a request?” John calls to them, after draining what appears to be a full tankard of pure ethyl alcohol.

“Anything, my King,” Roxy replies with an enviably saucy wink.

“Awww, you guys are the best. Play one of my songs!”

Roxy pauses mid-pluck to confer with Aradia, then abruptly segues to a jaunty major-key lead-in to a pleasant tune. “C’mon, y’all know this one,” she declares. “Don’t make us do all the work!”

You _don’t_ actually know this one, but everyone else seems to take that rather literally, including John, which is pretty funny given the content of the song itself.

[[Tune: No Hopers, Jokers, and Rogues]](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rY0j-5C1YbM)

_The Sea King’s the ocean that flows in our wake_  
_The Star King lights the sky to guide us home until daybreak_  
_But till you meet the Dead King on the Isle where he waits_  
_Give thanks to the Wind King for each breath you take!_

_He carries our language, the songs that we sing_  
_The legends they bear, the connections they bring_  
_Each story of his brethren is a story through him_  
_Each note we play, each word we say_  
_It all amounts to worshipping_

_The Sea King’s the ocean that flows in our wake_  
_The Star King lights the sky to guide us home until daybreak_  
_But till you meet the Dead King on the Isle where he waits_  
_Give thanks to the Wind King for each breath you take!_

There are rather a lot of verses to this song, including progressively more overwrought claims about John’s specific role in maintaining the fabric of reality, the invention and adoption of Common, and peculiarly enough, some business about rabbits, sung _by_ him, quite gleefully, which diminishes its verisimilitude just a tad.

You’re not really quite so into it, even once you pick up the chorus, and you find your attention wandering off to the corner, where Kanaya is sewing busily, and also the only other person who isn’t just absolutely losing their mind and ad-libbing verses and, increasingly, dancing.

Making yourself as inconspicuous as possible, you slip off the bench and away from the table, as the song segues to yet another ode. Not that there is anything wrong with odes! You are just… curious, and also would rather not get swept up in all the fervor if you can avoid it.

Kanaya glances up as you approach, smiling slightly.

“Room for another? If it’s not a bother,” you suggest, indicating a chair before you take it, just in case.

“I’m glad to speak with you again, Jake. Aradia spoke very highly of your efforts to become better acquainted with the situation, and her enthusiasm is quite infectious.”

You wouldn’t guess, to look at her; her youthful, unlined face has that ageless, tired look to it, her brilliantly green eyes not quite focused on you or the revelry occurring in the background as you seat yourself.

“Well, haha, yes, I should hope so,” you say nonetheless, smiling back yourself. “How long till we ship out?”

“Three more days. We’ll depart in the evening so as to coordinate our arrival with the cover of night in light of a few storms that are likely to slow us down, though only marginally.”

“Okay, excellent! I was thinking I’d go back to Mister Zahhak tomorrow, bug him a little more - d’you think I could invite him back here to practice dining? Or would that be too much of an imposition?”

“I would be happy to support you in anything you think might be helpful in preparing for this endeavor.”

You nod vaguely at this.

“If that’s the case, then, would you mind if I asked you a few more questions? I mean… tactics-type questions, shouldn’t be too hard, though I wouldn’t know what would and wouldn’t be… difficult for you to recount, not being you.”

She makes a sort of laugh-ish, sort of sigh-ish sound.

“Ask away, by all means. I’ll answer to the best of my abilities.”

“Well. Having read and heard a little more about the fellow, he sounds… uh, like a very challenging foe to meet in combat or otherwise. On account of the risks posed by standing against him, the brutality of his tactics, all that.”

“Yes, that is all true. Is there a question?”

“How did you beat him last time? Or, well, how did you _think_ that you did?”

Pushing away the documents in front of her, she turns her gaze away from you, like she’s watching it happen all over again, then shakes her head. Her scarf lands just slightly out of place, the hem flipped up a centimeter, but she doesn’t notice.

“We share many strengths and weaknesses, he and I. I exploited the most substantial of those; we wish, more than almost anything, to see the other dead. We’d gained intelligence as to the route he would be travelling, on the way to request further military support from Derse’s royalty in extinguishing us. In a ship that we could afford to lose, with others laying in wait, should any of us survive, we made to board them quietly as the sun rose. This was important, because he had to see me die. In the fervor of pitched battle, I shot myself twice; my crew reacted as though I had died of my wounds. This drew him out. Until this point, he had refused to put himself at risk; fair enough, since he was the last Ampora patriarch alive. We had systematically slaughtered the others, and their children, when we could. He knew there would be no quarter, and expected the rest of my small crew to be easily subjugated without his direct assistance.”

She sighs in recounting this, shows no particular emotion in response to any of it, though her expressions tighten as she speaks.

“But I gambled on his need to personally ascertain my death, and this proved a productive gamble. When he made to check my pulse, I tore off much of his face. It should not have been an especially survivable injury, though luck is a funny thing. They departed quickly without harrying us further, once he fell. Likely concerned about a corpse’s ability to pay them off.”

“Wow, that’s - well, quite the risk!” you say. “I mean, given what I’ve heard, I’d expect him just to hack you to bits to make sure! Or even just because he was in a hacking sort of mood!”

“Yes." She nods her affirmation of your helpful interjection. “I liked to think I knew him better than most, though.”

“I guess that’d be the case, right, after hunting him for so many years,” you muse. “But _wow_ , shooting yourself, that’s awful daring!”

“Not so much as you might think. I have always been a difficult person to kill,” she says simply.

You blink, suitably impressed by the whole story. Kanaya continues to be a rather perfect storybook anti-hero, right down to the ambiguity of her whole child murder thing! Like, surely it was a ‘kill some mostly-useless noble children so numerically more children will not be enslaved and ravaged and murdered and such’ kind of deal. That makes a lot of sense.

Curiosity satisfied, you nod agreeably.

“There’s another thing I’ll have to ask,” you continue. “Clothing-wise, nothing serious. Er, a trapping of my station, as it were, without which I doubt I’ll be able to adequately fulfill the role at hand.”

“Of course."

“Er. They’re called immulatio. I picked up a sample of black velvet, which should more than suffice. About three centimeters in width, fitted to the neck and ankles. They must be sewn on, and I don’t believe I can do it myself. Perhaps, ah, right before we make landfall at the Estate, so as not to worry anyone? Though it would be best to have them _made_ and fitted and all in advance.”

“That is easily done. Would you prefer to be fitted for them alone, then?”

Her gaze flickers over to Dirk, who is on his feet, dancing with Sollux, who looks terrifically unhappy with the arrangement, despite the fact that he is very much going along with it.

“Yes. I think that would be for the best,” you say, relieved.

“It will be as you’ve said,” she agrees, rifling through the parcels until she finds the vest you shoplifted. It doesn’t _really_ count, since you just stole from pirates, but, well, you’re a pirate, now, so you will just have to try to be consistent about your ethical standards.

“Thank you, by the way,” you add. “I’m sure this is all very unpleasant to talk about, what with all the awful things I’ve heard. I doubt I could ever understand, but I am grateful all the same.”

“It was a very long time ago,” she says quietly, beginning to mark up the vest with a little piece of chalk. “I will feel much better once he is dead. But thank you, both for your consideration and for your part in accomplishing this.”

“You’re very welcome!” you say, standing up and grinning, feeling better about joining in with the dancing, perhaps swapping in even and letting Aradia have a break.

You never thought you’d feel so grateful to have a dreadful, sadistic, totally deplorably slaving fellow to go visit. But it’s nice, in such a grey world, to have a distinctly darker shade of grey to go and stick a few knives in or whatever the hell. A lot of things don’t make sense, cause you a stomache-ache-y amount of anxiety at the sheer thought of either amputating them _or_ stewing in juice or whatever, but this is as straightforward as it gets.

The people in this tavern, all of them, _especially_ Dirk, are your team. The Kings, your friends, the man you love. And that is more than enough for now.


	10. Somio (or, a lullaby for would-be pirates) Part 1

You pass a long, peaceful morning in bed, reading your newly-acquired Dersian courtly romance novel. It is a later installment of a series, you find, but you pick the gist of it up pretty quickly.

Compared with the encyclopedia, and in general, it is a _delightful_ read. The protagonist is a plucky young Archagent, apparently an important courtly role, who does a great deal of murdering and has very strong opinions on fashion, a fixation that the narrative treats rather sympathetically. While not exactly relatable, you are fully in his camp by the time he kisses the fictitious Queen and also shoots her, in a scene that you imagine would make more sense with cultural context, or if you had been reading other novels in the series.

Or perhaps Dersian novels simply aren’t supposed to make sense. Either way, food for thought.

The morning is verging into noon as you set the novel down, stretch, and remember that you are actually quite hungry for the normal, stomachy kind of food. If Dirk hadn’t gone off to help with the endeavor to repaint the Ascension prior to embarking, you’d ask him to bring you something, ideally with much fluttering of eyelashes and flustering of the aforementioned paramour. Heh. You’re getting more than a little antsy about the whole ‘no getting hot and heavy, _ever_ ’, deal, but you think you’re adjusting admirably.

That’s kind of all there is to anything, right? Just figuring out how to deal with it and getting on with your life, studiously reading your novel, a totally helpful thing to do and not at all an excuse to laze about, and… yeah. You dress yourself in a set of fresh clothing, simple deckwear, no style to it at all - something Dirk must have picked up on his own shopping-type expeditions - and head downstairs, quietly attempting to whistle a jaunty tune.

In practice, whistling is next to impossible with your lip piercings. It’s difficult to hold your mouth properly. However, you are in the kind of mindframe where trying and failing does not dissuade you too horribly. You are happy just to try.

Downstairs, the tavern is basically empty, and you frown, trying to remember where everyone is. Most ought to be down at the shipyard, working on the catboat, obviously, but you’d been hoping someone might be about so you could bother them. Perhaps someone you have not spent a lot of time with, like Sollux, maybe, who Aradia seems very fond of. Probably plenty of self-examination you could do via the convenient backdrop of superficially getting to know him, plenty of revelations to dig up in an easy, low-stakes environment, that you would then be able to process into something actionable by the time you next saw someone you actually cared about in more than a perfunctory way!

But there’s no one around in the tavern space, not even the small handful of remaining workers who will be staying in _Starlight’s End_ to keep things shipshape and because they likely don’t have anywhere else to go. There is only so much rehoming Kanaya can accomplish in a few days, after all. That is too bad.

You stand around for a moment, listening for the source of some muffled clanking and voices, then make your way behind the bar, knocking at the door to the kitchen, politely, before you enter. It’s a large space, at least half the volume of the tavern itself, fairly low-ceilinged, but with clean, whitewashed walls and full of pleasant smells and the noises of life and movement.

“Heyyyyy, look who decided to show up ‘n pitch in!” Roxy calls from a position beside several massive stewpots on an assortment of stovetops. “You gonna help us get this place in order, Jakey?”

“In trade for food, I’ll do anything you ask, my friend!” you reply, relaxing marginally at the presence of someone familiar. “Can’t promise much on the helping hand front, as it is not my strong suit, but I will try my damnedest, at your orders!”

She glides along the row of pots, stirring here, adding spices and salts and whatever else there, satisfied with her work by the time she joins you at the front. From what you can discern, she and the couple of remaining kitchen-based employees are in the process of… what can only be described as ‘meal prep’, pickling cucumber bits and cabbage, sealing things in barrels, cooking down powders and unguents to be added as flavorings.

“So, what are we doing?” you ask, your hands on your hips, ready to dive right in, ideally to a position where you can snag something of a snack for yourself.

“Well, I talked to Kanaya, and we’re operating under the assumption that we’ll be able to restock when we loot the place. That said, I wanna make sure we’ve got plenty of wiggle room, so we’re set for the week and a half there and the hypothetical sail back! Three weeks of food for a crew our size is kind of a tall order, but I’ve got oodles of tricks up my sleeve.”

“I see!” you say, seeing.

She laughs, pressing a spare apron into your hands. “C’mon, Jakey, dontcha want to learn these mad skills? A ship _always_ needs a good cook. Few more years and I’ll have you distilling toluene too, but we can start here! I need apricots pitted and prepped. Find yourself a knife, one of the kids’ll help you get set up, don’t chop your fingers off!”

“Good advice!” you agree, searching out the stacks of lovely golden fruits and joining a quiet young man as Roxy continues to flit about the kitchen, stirring pots and packing jars and doling out instructions.

It isn’t hard work by any means, once you figure it out. There’s a stone about the size of your thumbtip hidden in each of the apricots, and you slip a paring knife in, carve out the top bit, and then pluck the stone out and pass it to the other worker at the station, who cracks it open and sticks the insidey bit, which you’re pretty sure is packed with cyanide, into a jar for later use with a stack of other such prizes. Waste not, want not, you suppose! In between, you nick a few slippery bits of golden flesh, the taste foreign but relatively pleasant.

Your next task involves filling casks with weak ale, then packing tightly-sealed crates with smoked meats, which Roxy helps out with personally, since it’s very important that they be as close to air-tight as you can manage. All told, it is a more physically demanding spell of work than you expected, but you’re also a great deal more physically capable than you used to be.

Every time you realize that, it surprises you all over again. You’re still estimating whether you can lift things and even how much space you’ll take up by your old parameters, but you’ve definitely gotten _bigger_ , with no one regulating what you get to eat, and especially with all the back-breaking work you’ve just been sort of expected to do around the ship and in general. Trying to maneuver through the tight space posed by the kitchen is almost a hazard, especially with a knife in hand. Because it’s unfamiliar, so you can’t do it on autopilot, like on the Diamond, and you keep knocking into things because you assume you’ll have more room than you actually do.

That is quite a bit of a bother.

You don’t _really_ mind it, though, the actuality of it. It’s nice to be able to help Roxy. You just wish it wasn’t such a long-term process. By now, in your opinion, you ought to be able to do _much_ more. She can heft the crates with far less conspicuous effort than you can, and insists on correcting your posture as you do so, which almost bugs you, because you were doing your best, and _helping_ her, besides, and not making any trouble for her, just straining a bit, and… and…

She’s right, it’s easier if you balance some of the weight on your hip, use your thighs a little more, and keep your back straight.

Roxy is _usually_ right about stuff. There is a reason Dirk admires and trusts her absolutely, you have to admit. And between you, the work moves quickly. You get used to it, in time, the way movement flows through the kitchen, how not to hip-check the handles on the massive ovens when you walk by or bowl into hapless employees in the process of moving about.

By the time you take a break, though, your stomach is cramping a scosche and you’re quite sweaty from the hot kitchen and fairly intense labor. Roxy cleans a gummed-up spatter of apricot viscera from your cheek with the hem of her apron, but seems pleased by the whole thing.

“Anyone ever toldja you learn _real_ fast when you want to?” she laughs, clinking a big glass of water with yours at a little table in the back of the kitchen over a luncheon of basically all of the perishable leftovers to be found in the kitchen.

“It’s been said,” you sigh. “I appreciate your adding your endorsement nonetheless. Cosigning the conclusion, as it were. I had an excellent teacher!”

“You’re such a damn flatterer!”

“Not at all, Miss Roxy. Merely the most honest gent situated this side of the Velvet Court.”

“That ain’t sayin’ much, babe.”

“I know,” you say. “I didn’t intend to.”

The rolls of flank steak from two nights ago, and the goose from the previous night, are all just as good this morning. You could take or leave the rather limp salad, but you remind yourself that you may not get much in the way of fresh vegetables once you’re at sea. A week and a half is a plenty long time, and you eat what you’re given with great gusto.

“How come you’re not out painting ‘n tarring with the rest of the crew?” she asks, after a trip to refill the both of your water glasses.

“Couldn’t I ask you the same thing?” you argue. “I, well, took the morning off to read a book. What’s your excuse?”

“I told you I work here, right? Because I work here,” she snorts. “I mean, sort of. Kanaya doesn’t charge me for a fancy private room, and I teach the babies about galley work and how to run a kitchen. Had _one_ willing to take me up on the chem-class offer, too, a while back. I think she’s on… it musta been the _Winged Stallion_ that picked her up as a gunner, she had _skills_!”

“Right, right, I just figured it was more of a… side gig?” you say. “You never seem to stop working.”

“Aw, look who’s being all observant!” she laughs, leaning over the rickety little table to give your forearm a pat, which would be more than just a little patronizing if the sparkle to Roxy’s dark eyes was anything less than sincerely delighted. “I keep busy. Important shit goin’ on here. Someone’s gotta do it!”

“Indeed,” you agree.

The bustle of the kitchens continues, though more muted without the two of you in the middle of it. Mostly in the washing-up stage, now, to keep any grime from multiplying, rabbit-like, and bringing vermin into the tavern. You sit quietly across from Roxy and savor your belated lunch. It’s nice, eating with a friend. She never so much as glances at your plate or appraises the manner in which you pick at it.

“I, well, I talked to Aradia the other day about this… infiltrate-and-murder situation,” you say, swallowing a mouthful of cold goose with great gusto. “I never really asked you, though, did I, before committing you to this whole thing. I sort of assumed you’d want to be included…”

“Based on my actions and words and shit, yeah,” Roxy interrupts with a snort.

“Yes, I mean… yes,” you laugh. “But you do seem to like it _here_ , too.”

“Always catches me off guard, how much I dig this place,” she adds, looking around fondly at the staff of young people scouring plateware and scrubbing countertops around you. “They’re good kids, ya know? Deserve a fair shot at stuff. It’s kinda unheard of, this sort of setup. This side of the boundary thingy, at least. Dunno what you guys got up to in Aetria.”

“There weren’t an awful lot of disadvantaged youths sitting around,” you say. “Anyone could get an education and a roof and meals and whatnot by pledging themselves to the caro supellecta for a decade, and a stipend for their family, besides, if they signed on before coming of age. I… think this setup might actually be a little better, though, if I’m being honest with you.”

“Doesn’t get much better than this,” she says, and you can see the gears turning in her head, trying to piece together other fragments of information you’ve divulged into a coherent picture of what you just said.

Well, she can try all she likes, she’s got a slim chance of figuring your meaning out if you can’t figure it out your damn self. You make an appropriately contemplative face and resume your luncheon.

Roxy leans back in her chair, arms crossed like she’s fomenting a follow-up. Fortunately for you - despite wracking your brain, you didn’t have a response to _any_ of the potential additions she might have made - the kitchen workers seem to have wrapped up their drudgery and one young woman comes over to tap on Roxy’s shoulder, redirecting her attention.

Rather than just dismissing the small crew of employees, she abandons her plate to fuss over each of them in turn, making sure they have agendas for the coming weeks, meetings with tradespeople you’ve never heard of seeking out apprenticeships, that they plan to keep their rooms tidy, wash behind their ears, and have fun, but not too much fun.

You do know a little something about body language, and while they complain about the song and dance of it all, they bask in the attention. The youngest of them can’t be more than sixteen or seventeen. Had Roxy regularly ruffled your hair and smudged grease off your face with a thumb at that age, while reminding you of her investment in your health and happiness, no less, you probably would have killed for her without a second thought. So you get it. It must be even more meaningful for the sort of children who likely had _no one_ , growing up.

“They worship the ground you walk on,” you observe, finishing up your plate as she rejoins you at the table.

“Aw, they’re good little fellas,” she laughs. “I sure hope they’ve got more sense than that.”

“On the contrary, it’s an eminently sensible position!”

“Stopppp, you’re gonna make me blush!”

“Good. Perhaps I’ve conveyed some portion of my point, then.”

“I think I know what your problem is, Jakey!” she protests, and your stomach drops a solid six inches.

“You do?”

“You’re too damn sweet!”

“Not an accusation I regularly receive,” you sigh, relieved. You are not at all in the mood for actual incisive commentary on anything. “Nor an especially accurate one, I think? But thank you, nonetheless.”

She clicks her tongue disapprovingly, but doesn’t say anything more on the subject. When you go to clean your plate, though, only a few of the least-choice scraps of goose meat remaining, she stops you.

“Save that, come with me. I’m about to blow your mind.”

“With the contents of my plate?”

“Yeah, hold onto your socks before they get knocked right the fuck off, okay? It’s juuust about time.”

You’ve gotten into stranger situations with less compelling explanations before, so you follow her back through the kitchen without argument as she checks stovetops and runs a fingertip over the counters, apparently satisfied by the standard of cleanliness and all. She leads you to a little door that can be propped open for air flow in the warmer months, ushering your out onto the cobblestone canalside pathway.

Admittedly, it feels a little silly, standing there with your plate, but she continues to usher you forward onto the stoop, then takes a seat, indicating that you should do the same.

“Roxy,” you stage-whisper, not wanting to give a false impression of how awed you may-or-may-not be by the sight, “I have seen the canal before.”

She snorts in response. “Just wait a second. I promise. You’ll love it.”

Distant voices and sounds of life become audible when you focus on them, but this is a quiet, largely residential part of the Court. A gondolier poles through the still water, near-silent. She glances up with moderate interest at the two of you, nodding politely at Roxy and narrowing her eyes curiously at you. You are starting to feel extremely ridiculous, somewhat beyond the pale. The plate is heavy on your knees.

Then, something stirs overhead, or maybe off in an alcove leading to a shed behind the tavern. You squint, like that will help you make out the odd, tremulous noise that whatever it is seems to be making.

Roxy definitely cottons on to the whole situation, though, and is back to making weird noises that sound like they are meant to be encouraging. Sort of a ‘pspspspspsps’ kind of thingamajig. You squint a little more, truly confused, now, as she waves her plate about like she is trying to use it as a signal mirror or perhaps perform a funky little sitting-down dance.

“If I may ask, what in the blue blazes are you -” you begin, but you trail off almost as soon as you’ve started as a shadow in the alleyway appears to sprout a pair of bright yellow eyes and you shriek in horror and grasp her by the arm. While slighter than Dirk, and actually a little smaller than you, these days, she is solid and very comforting to seize in a panicked fervor. “Roxy! Do something!”

The ‘something’ that she does, however, is click her tongue encouragingly and make more soft little sounds.

A lithe, graceful, fluffy little beast emerges from the cover of darkness, and you gasp in surprise. Aetria is very strict about cats; they were imported an awful long while ago, and are typically regarded as an odd, foreign, status-symbol type pet. They don’t survive very well outside of the wealthy households in which they are kept, in part because they do not have any fur at all.

You are at least eighty percent sure that there is a cat under all of that fluff, and Roxy nudges you in the side as though to confirm that this is a normal thing that is happening, and this is a normal sort of animal that exists and stuff.

“Make kissy noises!” she instructs you. “Put your hand out, let the little guy sniff! They love it.”

“Is it a cat?” you ask, still hesitant, though you extend your hand, flat and steady, and the living shadow does get an awful lot closer. It seems more interested in the plate on your lap than in you, but pads closer, undeterred by your outstretched hand.

“Yeah, we’ve got loads of ‘em in the Court,” she says, looking a little confused by your confusion.

As Roxy suggested, the little guy does indeed love to sniff, as evidenced by the way he does so immediately, poking at you inquisitively with a tiny, velvety-black nose that feels almost as chilly as the ambient temperature. Immediately, you segue from being worried about the sanctity of your fingertips to worrying about the little animal that _seems_ disinclined to sink its milky-white teeth into them.

“How do they keep warm?” you ask, as the cat begins to rub its small face against your hand, vibrating as it does so. “Is anyone looking after them?”

She quirks up an eyebrow and gestures first at you, then at herself.

“He’s old enough for meat,” she notes. “Give him some goose bits, see how he takes it!”

You briefly retract your hand, much to the cat’s indignation, and tear off a piece of stringy flesh, balancing it on a fingertip and offering your hand once again. Without seemingly any sense of self preservation or restraint, the cat takes the meat right off you, devouring it in just a few bites. Underneath all that fluff, you suspect that it is quite skinny.

“We need more food,” you announce, turning urgently to Roxy. “I don’t have nearly enough for him.”

Dissatisfied with the speed at which you are offering more meat-bits, the cat ducks under your arm like a soft, four-legged snake and climbs into your lap to begin digging into the half-finished pieces of bird that sit on your plate. You don’t do a thing to stop it, just watch, totally captivated, as it pulls skin and fat and scraps of unwanted muscle off, and they seem to vanish into its little pink mouth.

“No bones,” Roxy cautions you, and you poke through the leavings, just to be sure. “Cooked bones are bad for ‘em. And don’t worry, this isn’t all they get! These guys live in the basement. I teach the kids to toss down raw poultry necks and stuff, so they’ll hang around. They eat rats and roaches and basically anything you don’t want in a tavern-slash-inn.”

“Do they get bigger than this?”

The cat in your lap, satisfied with its meal, had seated itself comfortably on your thigh and started to clean itself with its tongue. You watch in fascination. Mother didn’t like to keep useless pets. These are very different, though, than the fat, roly-poly, hairless sort that childless courtiers of a certain age are known to cart around in perambulators, dressed as infants.

“This one’s not like a _baby_ -baby, but he’s not as big as he’s gonna get, either. He’s prooobably part of a litter from about when we were here last time. Go on, give him a scritch behind the ears once he’s done washin’ up, if you want!”

You wait until the little fellow seems cozy and stationary, returned to the urgent task of vibrating like the rattle of a small motor, before offering him your hand for another curious sniff or seven and gingerly running the backs of your fingers over his tiny cat-shoulders.

Remarkably, he does not bite your or dig his claws into you. Merely closes his eyes and continues to rumble quietly but ominously, as befits such a being. Roxy laughs in delight as you settle in to petting him.

“Hey, you’re a natural!” she observes, which you are pretty sure is not true, but you smile anyway, mostly because you have a _creature_ sitting on you, and what else are you to do?

“I think this may just be an exceptionally tolerant example of the species,” you remark, still unbearably hesitant about touching it, practically jerking away at the slightest twitch of a fluffy black ear, though the cat doesn’t seem to mind much.

“Don’t go playing favorites just yet,” she snorts, taking a bit of meat from her plate and full-on chucking it in the direction the little cat came from. “Let me handle the mama cat, alright? She knows me.”

“Mama cat?” you start to say, baffled, as Roxy redoubles her clicky-mouth-noise efforts and, like some kind of enthralling Fylyyne Godyss of cat summoning, her efforts draw out four more slinky, fluff-coated little beasts and a larger, sleeker example of a cat who must be their mother.

“Awwww, hi kittens!” Roxy announces, shuffling around to intercept the crew with open arms. They hardly stop to sniff before climbing onto her, and one by one, she picks them up and sets them on top of you for safekeeping.

You go still as a statue, no longer patting the first kitten. Someone could probably knock you into the canal with a feather. Not all of them make the rumbly-soft chest noises, either. They squawk and trill like little birds, and the fellow who’s already used to being in your lap joins in, rubbing his little face against your hand as his brethren devour the remains of your lunch, demanding more attention.

That is fair, you imagine you would do the same in his position.

Distantly, you register that Roxy is engaged in what looks almost like a _conversation_ with their mother, whose corresponding dysfunctional-small-motor noise is as loud as all her children’s put together. She’s a handsome little beast, dappled orange and whiteish-grey and black, especially on her face, like she is wearing a mask.

In addition to the little black kitten currently climbing up your chest, mewling piteously, you’ve got another all-black fellow with a star on his forehead, one who looks an awful lot like her mother, and two fluffy orange kittens play-fighting over a particular scrap of goose despite the fact that there are _several_ other goose-bits waiting to be consumed.

Trying to remember how Roxy pulled it off, you gently lift the kitten who’s got a mind to climb up to your shoulder by his hindquarters, with another hand beneath his front legs, and while his claws dig into your shirt, you pull him free before you start bleeding or anything and cradle him sort of like a baby human, which doesn’t seem to bother him too much.

These are a very good sort of cat, you decide. The fur is an excellent addition to the animal, all soft and silky. You remain as still as you can manage, apart from petting the black kitten very meticulously, still somewhat shocked that he is letting you do so, as the rest of them bulldoze through the remaining food, licking clean first the plate and then themselves.

“Roxy!” you call. “Come look!”

You have no fewer than _five_ little animals cozied up to you, furred up against the wind, seemingly quite delighted by your body temperature and completely content to otherwise ignore you, apart from the one in your arms, which is still sort of ignoring you, but affectionately.

Her delighted laughter in response rings over the canal, and you can feel the scrutiny of the big, pale-green eyes of the mother cat, watching you closely from Roxy’s side.

“Mutiny likes you,” she observes, indicating the first little black fellow, who is rumbling contentedly in your arms, his eyes shut.

“I’m sorry, did you name the kittens after _crimes_?”

“They’re good names! Mutiny, Larceny, Unlawful Possession Of A Firearm - that’s the stupider orange boy - Perjury, and Treason. Mama cat is Lulu. One of the kids named her, nothin’ I can do about that. She answers to it.”

Unlawful Possession Of A Firearm is trying to eat his own slender orange tail. Mutiny blinks in vague scorn and nestles back into the crook of your arm, buzzing like a hive of bees.

“Cats are good,” she adds, with an emphatic scritch behind Lulu’s ears, regarding you fondly as you try to corral the rest of the kittens, most of whom are growing restless after their meal. “These ones especially get a _lot_ of lovin’ from the kids, so they’ve got basically no hangups about people. Pretty sure any of the kitchen staff would literally fillet anybody who _looked_ at the kittens funny.”

You nod agreeably. That sounds about right. They are very small, and surprisingly tame for a kiboodle of partially-wild things that can presumably kill their own dinner with their wicked-sharp claws and teeth. Probably too trusting for their own good. Mutiny’s head, beneath the fluff, is about as big as a crabapple. They seem to have no concept of just how small and delicate they are.

“Gosh,” you sigh. “They certainly are aces, you’ve got that right.”

“Figured you’d be a fan,” she laughs. “No cats in Aetria?”

“Sort of, but not… like these,” you concede, holding Mutiny a little closer to your breast. He squirms, but his claws remain concealed, and he relaxes when you resume stroking his shoulders. “Uh. I doubt you’d even recognize them as cats, if this is what you’re accustomed to. They are rather ugly to most tastes, and not nearly so valuable as anything but a passive symbol of one’s ability to sustain a totally useless animal.”

“Aw. A cat’s a cat! You gotta love what you got.”

“I never had one, anyway, so I don’t suppose I’d know,” you say. “But they certainly weren’t predisposed to the hunting of vermin. Which wasn’t much of a problem, since we wiped out rats and most other pests on La Ansephemine and in most of the countryside literal centuries ago, it was among the earliest policy objectives of the First Empress once she got the boundary up. It’s basic history, though I don’t know if I’ve ever considered the implications for household pets? Without much to do, they become rather round and sleepy and inept.”

Roxy makes a chiding sort of noise, leaning over to take Unlawful Possession Of A Firearm from your lap before he can choke himself to death on your boot lace.

“D’you really think this li’l guy is gonna be some kinda champion mouser?” she says, holding him up to your face. As you watch, he shifts his attentions to his own foot, startles as he sinks his needle-sharp teeth in, gets confused at the hurt of it, and starts to cry pitifully.

“I’m going to hazard a guess that the answer to that question is… probably not?”

“Heh. No, definitely not. Some of them just kinda suck. Even these ones. And they’re _all_ born blind and totally helpless! Basically the size of bread rolls. Super cute, but like… a decent-size litter like this is a huge burden on mama cat, too. I’m gonna get Aradia to fix ‘em all once we get home from this whole… what’d you call it? Murder-infiltration dealie?”

“That works as well as any description,” you agree, though you hold Mutiny a little tighter at the thought. Poor fellow. He protests the squeeze, giving you a warning nip until you laxen your grip.

“You don’t care about this little idiot any less, though, do ya?”

“Uh. No, I can't say I do,” you say, actually performing an inventory of your sentiments, just out of curiosity. Which you don’t usually do. No, you definitely just think it is kind of cute how the kitten is now making a valiant effort to get his mouth on Roxy’s bleached-golden hair, not apparently aware that it is several feet too far away for that endeavor to bear fruit.

“Good, ‘cause he doesn’t love you any less either, so long as you bring him some snacks and let him get cozy on your lap! All you gotta do is show up. And, I mean, not drop kick ‘em into the canal or something shitty like that. Takes time, but they’ve had a few months to warm up to people, and it’d take some reeeaaal bullshit to undo that, at this point. Okay?”

“Roxy,” you say, after a pregnant pause, a whole lot of pieces suddenly coming together all at once. “Did Dirk put you up to this?”

She blinks owlishly, then laughs.

“Dude, no. If DiStri knew I was carting you out to see the kittens, I think he’d scrub the wholeass kitchen for the chance to watch. Uh. No offense, obviously, but it’s not like any of us have missed the whole thing where you two aren’t always doin’ so hot? What with the occasional shouting stuff? And like, I’m glad that’s settled down, but I wanted to try and… I dunno. You know it’s not just him, right? All of us love the living shit outta you. You’re not my dumb best friend’s boyfriend, you’re _my friend_ , and my crewmate, and I love you, and I don’t give a fuck if you help me can vegetables and scour pots or not, though thanks for that! I love you ‘cause you’re fun to hang around with, and you’ve got cool ideas, you’re clearly tryin’ to do right by all of us, when you remember, and you’re the best fishing apprentice _ever_ , and sometimes you let me nap on your shoulder! And that’s _literally_ all it takes. So don’t tell me I’m wrong.”

“That… seems like it rather cheapens the idea of love,” you argue, shifting uncomfortably. The kittens on your lap have proved perhaps the single most effective deterrent to your standing up and making the most hasty retreat that has ever been executed. She’s got you right where she wants you, drat!

“Love ain’t _cheap_ , but it’s not like I’m hoardin’ it, either,” she says, gesturing emphatically with the kitten in her hands, which mews tremulously in apparent affirmation of her point. “You only got as much as you give! And for the record, _I_ feel like we got a little lovey thing goin’ on, you and me. In fact, I’m kinda gamblin’ on it.”

“You sure are,” you sigh, feeling petulant and a little boxed into a corner by this whole thing. “I - I don’t know, you clearly are my friend, but just for the record, I am staying here because I have kittens on me, not because this is pleasant or comfortable or reassuring _at all_.”

“I’ll take it,” she says, setting Unlawful Possession Of A Firearm back on your lap. “Here, have him back. This is total bribery, I’ll cop to that much!”

“A pretty good kitten name, that,” you say, and she giggles in response.

Their mother does not have the patience for the sustained pause that follows, snaking her way out from under Roxy’s hand and making urgent meow-y noises, riling up the kittens and dislodging most of them form your lap near immediately, their tails perked up and swaying, effortless counterbalances to their toddly movements.

Roxy pats them each as they wiggle past on the cold cobblestones, and eventually you are forced to let Mutiny, who has very nearly fallen asleep in your arms, down to your lap, though you continue to pat him in the hopes that he will stick around a little longer.

“We’ll rehome ‘em in about a month, once Aradia’s given them a snip,” she remarks offhandedly. “Don’t know what you’re plannin’ on after this, but if you stick around in the Court…”

“Haha, maybe,” you say, not sure yourself what the future might hold. Really at all, to be quite frank. Though this would not be the worst thing you can imagine. “I’ve kept dogs, sort of. I don’t suppose they’d be much more challenging, would they?”

“Wayyy lower maintenance,” she assures you. “So, if ya make it home in one piece, that’s somethin’ to look forward to, huh? I don’t think anyone’s called dibs on Mutiny. The li’l black cats usually aren’t the hot ticket item, which is dumb, ‘cause he’s great.”

“He certainly is,” you agree, reluctant to let him go, though his mother is quite insistent about tidying his fluff and nudges him away almost immediately once you’ve set him down.

“I bet you’ve got other stuff to do,” she notes, as the small flock of kittens is harried back to the alley, standing up, brushing herself off, and offering you a hand. You appreciate the easy ‘out’ - Kanaya mentioned that she wanted to do a fitting, you could always head down to the docks and try to make yourself useful, but none of that is necessarily urgent or scheduled - and nod gratefully. “But just keep in mind that I actually do love you, ya huge dumbass, and you gotta deal with me for the next coupla weeks, so you might as well get used to that!”

“Thank you, Roxy,” you say, which is probably not the right answer when someone tells you they love you, but is the truth. You are definitely grateful. You don’t know if you know enough to say it back and not be lying, but you do know that you don’t want to lie to her. That she probably wouldn’t like it much if you did.

And she hugs you, and gives you a little kiss on the cheek once you’ve returned your apron to her, and that feels better than you thought it would. And as you head upstairs to change our of your cat-fur-coated clothing and get it in the pile that’s being toted out for a washhouse, you don’t feel scared at all. 

Just sort of warm and full, which is somewhat like how you think love is maybe supposed to be. The kitten kind, at least. Not a bad kind at all, you must admit.

\---

The interior of Kanaya’s dressmaking studio looks a great deal like her office; dark wood panelling, a sense of having been lived in and used and maintained for many years, a sort of comfortable chaos to the piles of fabric, the closet full-to-bursting with useful garments, the massive foot-pump sewing machine affixed to a desklike structure beside the triple-mirror setup.

The plinth on which you stand is steady, and while the mirror is definitely on the older side, oxidized by incursions from the wet, salty air, no doubt, you like being able to see yourself in your entirety.

As a situation, this one is far more familiar than clothes shopping. You hold yourself stock still, your bearing impeccable, as Kanaya methodically pins, adjusts, and adds little chalk markings to your freshly-purchased clothing. It’s odd, admittedly, that it’s _her_ doing this, now. You didn’t know the name of the palace tailor who typically attended to you, though he was equally businesslike, and you liked him well enough.

But she moves with such superhuman grace and ease, at one point summoning a needle and thread seemingly from thin air and effortlessly reattaching a set of onyx buttons after slicing off their inadequate wooden forbears, the picture of efficiency and talent. Your mouth feels dry. You wish you had not eaten quite so much late-breakfast-lunch-whatever, in case she finds your figure distorted and is disappointed in you.

Kind of a lost cause, anyway. Muscle was a tremendous nonstarter while you were interned in the temple, your diet monitored carefully in a way that continued once you were at the palace. Standards and all, you could hardly complain. It wasn’t _comfortable_ , and you spent an awful lot of time daydreaming about getting a full serving of basically any meat, ever, but no one hires a litgamella for a handyman. The point was to be graceful, to _have_ lines so that you could work them.

What good are the natural, beautiful contours of human bone when bound in too much flesh?

It’s one thing when it’s… someone else, when it’s Dirk, he makes it seem so simple. But you still feel a very real shudder of disapproval at the way you’re changing as you actually _work_ and sustain a complete diet and all that. If the priests could see you now. If _anyone_ could see you now. It’s impossible to explain to anyone not from Aetria, how wrong it all looks, reflected back from _multiple_ angles. How badly you’ve broken the rules.

She obviously isn’t as disgusted as it seems she ought to be, doesn’t seem to care about anything but ensuring that the modified long, drapey coat lays flat over the burgundy chamise and cream-colored ruffly linen skirt you’re wearing, both of which already fit quite well. You try to stop thinking about it, to get into her headspace. It’s a lovely coat, black and structured with embroidered roses running from the shoulders to the hem, though it was clearly made for someone a bit slimmer and also broader-hipped than yourself.

Turning away briefly, she jots down a few measurements and gently removes the coat from your shoulders.

“Next set,” she suggests, keeping her attention politely diverted to her notes as you doff this assemblage of fancy duds, fold them carefully, and swap for the next pile of garments in the lineup, a pair of drapey black trousers that might need a little taking-in at the waist, but otherwise fit swimmingly, and a tight, vividly-red satin doublet, plus a long black cape.

There are only two fairly small windows, but a number of lamps provide abundant light as you look yourself over.

You think you look rather like a vampire on the cover of a novel. It’s a bit more masculine than your typical style, and the top is not especially comfortable, a bit constricting in the chest and more than a little unpleasant over your piercings, which she observes, adding a few fresh chalk marks for alterations and updating her notebook accordingly.

“Perhaps this for arrival,” she suggests, glancing up as you fight the urge to fidget. “It should set the right impression, but I would rather not have you so uncomfortable for a long period of time. You’ll only have to wear it for an hour or two before you’ll be able to excuse yourself.”

“It’s fine, no trouble at all,” you assure her. “I’m a bit of a baby about this sort of discomfort, but I can take it for as long as we need.”

“There is absolutely no reason to torture yourself, unless that is something you _personally_ enjoy,” she notes, with a raised eyebrow.

You flush as crimson as the shirt.

“Not exactly my preference,” you say shortly. “It was just an offer!”

“Jake. Your comfort and ease will be of far more use to you than unnecessary suffering. Please let me know if anything else is particularly troublesome. That is the point of this exercise, not merely the fun of dressing you up, though you have been a pleasant and cooperative model to work with thus far.”

“Oh! Really-truly?” you say, brightening up a bit.

“Yes. You have lovely posture,” she says, patting your shoulder through the stiff fabric of the shirt. “Should you choose to remain in the Court, once all is said and done, I would gladly invite you back to help me with future projects.”

Unfortunately, your slight swell of pride is interrupted by the fit of the garment she is inspecting, and you descend into a several-second coughing fit, only to look up with watery eyes to see her smiling fondly.

“Chin up,” she reminds you, as you straighten back up and she resumes her work.

There is a lot about Kanaya that’s easy for you to like. When she touches you, it is only in the most perfunctory way possible, though never unkind. Her hands are smooth, strong, and sure. Wearing sensible heels, she’s about as tall as you are, standing on the little raised plinth before her mirrors. Up close, her features knit together in concentration as she does one thing or another, occasionally stitching or pinning while you watch, her face no less handsome for her expression, her eyes no less brilliantly green. The set of her nose is straight, prominent, and regal, her cheekbones set high in her face, her jaw noble and her brow strong, but her eyes are just plain _pretty_ , fringed with long, dark lashes with a slight curl to them.

She must have gotten some proper sleep, after the previous evening, because the bruise-like circles beneath her eyes are diminished to almost nothing, and her headscarf is folded immaculately, with a few jaunty gold pins augmenting it in various places.

The more you look at her, the more you think she might just be the loveliest woman you’ve ever seen. Heh. Mother would be rolling over in her grave, if Dirk had left much of her to roll.

Well, no sense thinking about that, and even less sense ever ever _ever_ talking about it. All has already been said and done and skinned and bled out very conclusively, and it doesn’t even bother you, how things are. How things have worked out is probably as well as they could have.

The fitting session lasts another hour and a half, after which you volunteer an extra pair of hands to stitch and cut anything that doesn’t _need_ to look too nice, that will be hidden beneath other garments or the drapes of them or that shouldn’t have too much bearing on the overall silhouette. She takes you up on the offer, and you’re grateful for every second of Aradia’s instruction on the voyage to La Ansephemine, because Kanaya conspicuously notices everything you do correctly and compliments you with sincere gratitude. You feel like you might be glowing, possibly. She intervenes only occasionally to correct you, and when she does, it just makes the praise feel more sincere, the fact that she actually seems to care how well you do.

You don’t talk a great deal. She seems more comfortable than most with working in silence, and you don’t mind that one bit. Out in the main body of the tavern, you can hear strains of dialogue, laughter, barrels being rolled out of the kitchen and onto waiting gondolas, crates or kneecaps knocking into tables, profanities muffled by the walls.

She seems to register the re-entry of the crew to _Starlight’s End_ around the same time you do, looking up thoughtfully in time to see your gaze flit to the door.

“As pleasant as it is to work parallel to you, we ought not to be wasting this time,” she notes. “You’ve done your reading, and I’m sure you’ve heard more than enough from Mister Strider as well as myself to have some idea of what we’re dealing with.”

It’s not a question.

“Yes, well, I definitely have some… thoughts, I suppose. From my own experience with such people like him, too.”

“There are very few people like him.”

You laugh shortly.

“Not few enough!”

The smile that tugs at the corner of her meticulously painted lips as she nods in reply is as affirmational a gesture as you’ve literally ever received.

“You know your audience _very_ well, Jake. Tell me more about how you plan to approach your part in this endeavor, procedurally.”

“It’s pretty straightforward!” you say, setting aside the skirt you’ve been hemming to gesticulate more effectively.

This is a familiar scene for you, sitting down to talk this specific kind of strategy. Exactly how things used to go with mother, once you’d finished your term of devotional service at the temple and were once again consigned to the palace’s stewardship. Those were the first actual-conversation-type conversations you had with her, as close to equals as it ever got between you and her.

Mother trained at the temple herself, after all, once upon a time. On this subject, unlike most any other, you were speaking a common language, one in which you were not woefully inept by her standards. True, she’d moved on to governance once she’d been passed the reins to the country, as it were, and you never expected that to be your path, but there was a true kinship, maybe, ish, to your shared… to… being good at something that she actually valued, that she cared about enough to be good at it herself, that made you at least a little like her.

So before you’d take a patron, you’d discuss what she wanted out of the arrangement. And there would be no funny business to it at all, just two people with equal stake in the outcome of a transaction.

You have a whole lot of tricks of your own that made the whole thing very easy. When preparing to deal with a client, you would turn the lens of your attention wholly towards any ambiently available information you could dig up that might be useful. Get together an idea of what they might be like, so there would be no surprises, sure. Everyone does that part, more or less, though you like to think you’re better than most at figuring out what people are like without actually having to speak with them or whatever the fuck.

What helps most, though, it to distill the situation down to a few basic components. You could do the sex-ing part in your sleep, obviously, though that _particular_ -philia is rarely requested. All you have to do is flick the autopilot switch ‘on’ and retreat to somewhere quiet in your brain, the rest is quite intuitive. You do what they like until the time is up, and you’re damn good at it.

There’s other parts, too, though. If mother was courting a political alliance, she might suggest that you get the fellow talking about his ambitions, bolster those a little bit - make him feel powerful as well as _good_ , a little more amenable to sweeping moves to affirm his position of authority, a little more likely to overextend himself to curry favor with the Empress. The gift of your time is one thing; the _effect_ you’re able to invoke during that time is quite another, with great strategic value. Similarly, to placate or stave off potential threats, you might walk into an engagement prepared to subvert any talk of ‘a husband’s recent poisoning’ or ‘the tragic falling-through of a lucrative contract with the Empire’ into something positive in the most delicate way possible, without ever _implicating_ mother, or even mentioning her in the same breath as a negative topic. To let (often perfectly reasonable) hurt feelings roll off your affect like water from oiled sailcloth, maneuver the patron towards more pleasant lines of thought. And feeling.

She was rarely quite so direct in asking you to do these _specific_ things, but you took your knowledge and her general expression of her objectives as a challenge, nonetheless. And sure, more often than not it was gold she was looking to gain or else gold for which you were a stand-in in some bargain or another, but that would hardly surprise any litgamella worth their salt.

There was a lot that you never had the chance to voice to her. That you _did_ understand, truly, that you were grateful, in the end, for all of it. At the time of your relegation to the temple, you’d fought it tooth and nail, had wanted so desperately to stay with her. Really, though, it was a kind of gift, the opportunity to understand her slightly better, to be something she wanted rather than a burden. To have _something_ to talk about, sometimes!

True, nostalgia is a liar sometimes, and if you look back with too much scrutiny, you definitely were dissatisfied about some things. You definitely wanted more. Recognition, mostly. But when have you not wanted more of that, and everything, from those you love? Has there ever been a time when you have not been crushed beneath the weight of your own monstrously insatiable _want_?

None of it matters quite so much, now that she is dead and someone else has no doubt ornamented her skull to join those of the rest of your family’s behind the throne. You’ve sketched it out, how you would have done it, what you think she would have looked like, more than once. Skulls are about the only thing you know how to draw properly. You hope whoever they entrusted with the task did a good job of it, did her credit. She had a lovely prominence to her zygomatic process that you, unfortunately, did not inherit, very dramatic.

Either way, the whole pre-job process is familiar, comforting, even, and it is sort of like… setting parameters for yourself, and then you can freestyle quite effectively within them.

This is what you explain to Kanaya. And she doesn’t stop you, or interrupt, or contradict anything you suggest. Just sews and listens. 

Your twin objectives are to occupy his time and to disinvite skepticism. Being aware of his interest in your culture is very helpful towards that end; you could carry on a blithe conversation about traditional Aetrian religious custom for days straight, only about half of which would be bullshit made up on the spot, if anyone were interested! 

In situations such as this, you find it is pretty easy to play the part of an airheaded do-nothing of a prince - heh, you are a bit _method_ in that respect - and the role is also strategically advantageous in that it sets the subject of your attentions at ease and diminishes their expectations of any potential subterfuge.

“For example, all this studying-up I’ve been doing on Dersian custom,” you explain. “Half the value of that is ensuring that I break the rules in a manner that suggests that I am trying but failing to adhere to them! This sort of fellow… they do _so_ love to be right about obvious things.”

She laughs at the right moments, and you beam, delighted.

“I would be inclined to agree,” she says, once it becomes clear that you’re not going to elaborate any further without prompting, her smile still in her voice if not on her face as she speaks. “With most all of that, in fact.”

“Really?” you say excitedly. “So you think that’s… right?”

“Possibly the most auspicious approach out of any I could formulate myself, yes. This is an area in which you are strong. You have many things he has reason to want, and a great deal of desirable information that he does not possess. You’re in a position of advantage, despite this taking place in his home. When one has the upper hand, it is good practice to behave as though one does not, without losing track of that handhold in the process. I trust your capability to do so.”

“...really?” you say again, feeling a bit silly about it.

“Ought I not to? You yourself suggested that you were predisposed for this sort of endeavor. That this was your ‘wheelhouse’, as it were. Nothing you’ve said has contraindicated those conclusions.”

Huh. A little out of left field, though also… not, at all.

“I… I don’t know,” you laugh. “I just. I don’t suppose I thought I’d given you much reason to think highly of my decision-making, or… I mean. It’s not as though you could dress _Karkat_ in this garb and have him act an Aetrian prince. I am kind of your only option. That was more or less what I figured was going on.”

“Hilarious as that would be, you are once again correct. You are uniquely well-suited to this role in a number of respects. All the more reason to be delighted when you prove that your talents are multifaceted and substantial in their scope.”

“Oh, you don’t need to… say, I mean, that’s hardly…” you begin to argue, trailing off as she raises an eyebrow at you. Your ears feel warm and pink and you don’t exactly know what to do with your hands. “I mean. Thank you.”

“You don’t take praise easily,” she notes, and you can feel yourself color even further in response to the _utterly cursory_ observation, which, you think, hardly bore mentioning, probably.

Shrugging in response, you pretend to direct your focus to your hemming rather than to anything she might have been commenting on. The needle shakes between your fingers, and she is _definitely_ noticing that, as well.

“Perhaps not,” you say, after a moment, when the silence becomes overwhelming and it is clear that you are not going to be able to change the subject back to ‘not talking’ so easily.

“I won’t press the issue,” she replies. “I would prefer to use this time to offer counsel of my own, recognizing your starting point for what it is. I guarantee that, as surely as he will underestimate you, you will underestimate him reciprocally. It is impossible to expect too much of Dualscar. He was every bit my equal, once. It would be foolish to assume that to have changed in half a century.”

“Oh. Huh,” you say, frowning over your half-hemmed skirt. “I guess that is something that I have… trouble with. I tend not to think much or highly of other people? It’s sort of a work in progress.”

“I wish it were that simple,” she sighs. “He may just as well aim to falsely convince you of his strength. All I can guarantee is that he will be playing his own kind of game. Anything he says, you must take it with a pinch rather than a grain of salt.”

“Yikes, that is an awful lot of salt!”

“Indeed it is.”

“You…” you hesitate over the words. “ _You_ figured me out rather quickly.”

“I would call that an overstatement of my capabilities and an understatement of your complexity, but yes. With the benefit of half a century working with people whose backgrounds resemble your own in some key respects. I very much doubt that he can say the same. Though you’re correct to be concerned - that’s why we’ll be lying as little as possible. The truth is that you are a deposed prince, and beneath that layer of the truth, you are a young man badly out of his element, as I’ve observed before. You weren’t born into this life.”

“No,” you concede. “I definitely wasn’t.”

“You want to go home.”

“I…” You trail off again.

Not a question, just a matter-of-fact statement, and it cuts to the bone. You haven’t been daydreaming about Aetria, much, to tell the truth of it. When you do, you don’t envision sailing back to La Ansephemine, returning to your life as it was. You know that doesn’t exist anymore. Something about your home burnt away like a corpse in a crematorium when mother died, leaving a pile of grey-white ash behind. Jane has taken to the sea as well. She must know it, too.

It’s an impossible want, the worst and most common, basal, _stupid_ kind. To go home, to feel ‘home’ without feeling sick and scared and like the walls are closing in at the same time the floor falls out from underneath you.

“I don’t think that will be a problem to convey,” you say at last, clearing your throat as though that was the only reason for your pause.

“I can tell you, from personal experience, the nostalgia for where you come from will fade someday,” she says gently. “One can fight it, grieve it, be consumed by it, but regardless, it _will_ fade if one lives long enough to let it. I hope to help see to it that you do.”

You wonder what she could possibly have to be nostalgic over. Surely not the Estate where she was born into chains and presumably monstrous abuse? Her mother, perhaps, cruelly taken from her by the villainous Lord who nearly killed her, too? Home can be a person. And it can… shift. Easily, sometimes. Strangely so. Trauma can do weird things to people, in theory. Best to keep an open mind.

“I hope so, too,” you say, wondering if this might mean she’ll put in a good word for you with the Sea King right off the bat. “It seems to be more a matter of time than anything.”

“You’re very subtle,” she says, chuckling softly. At least she no longer has the distant, almost glassy look to her deep green eyes. You smile in response, the picture of debonair good-humor. That was totally intended to make her laugh, as a reference, not merely to allude to the thing you want!

_Totally._

From outside of the studio, you hear a laugh that is undeniably Roxy’s ring out, and look up, as though by making eye contact with the noise, you might understand its source. Distracted from your catchstitched hem yet again, drat. Kanaya notes this with an easy attentiveness, the same way she notes everything.

“I’ll finish that,” she offers. “It won’t take long at all. If you’re willing to do me a favor.”

“Of course, anything!” you reply, feeling a little cooped up, like the sense of claustrophobia of the small room and a second wind after the tired decadence of post-lunch have both caught up with you at once.

“I gave Mister Strider an errand for this afternoon, and he’ll need company to accomplish it bloodlessly, having met him.”

“Dirk’s not -” you begin, tired of talking about this already.

“He can more than defend himself, Jake. Do go ahead, now, and give him and all the crew my best. Do something fun this evening, won’t you?” She sighs. “You’re very young.”

That seems a bit of a non-sequitur in context - obviously, most everyone looks young compared to her, though not… looks-wise - but you nod like it makes perfect sense, fighting back an excited smile. You miss Dirk, it’s been more like hours than anything but you _miss_ him and you want to know all the interesting things he’s been doing and the thoughts he’s been thinking and… everything! You are parched and desiccated in a desert of Dirk facts.

Kanaya smiles like she can read your mind.

“ _Have fun_ ,” she reminds you, pacing over to the overfull closet. “And won’t you have a look and see if there’s anything that fits you in here? The temperature will only fall from hereon out, and if you catch ill, I’ll be very cross about it.”

Admittedly, you _have_ been feeling the chill a bit, of late, and can’t very well carry about a caboodle of kittens with you wherever you go, so you reluctantly let her steer you over to the garment rack, complaining the whole while about how all the fabric will drown your figure. Either she knows you’re semi-joking, or is willing to sustain your ridiculousness, because she neither snaps at you for being a terrific fussbudget nor backhands you across the face for wasting her time. Both of which you, well, sort of a little bit expect her to do, since the last time someone made you put on a coat, you were a whole lot shorter and not yet important enough for people not to be allowed to damage you in the course of teaching you a lesson.

It’s strange, this sense of being cared for by someone so emphatically your superior in just about every way. The rules are all topsy-turvy, and for all it has you off balance, you like it, how you can trust her to know more than you.

There is an acute fragility to other people, in their incomprehensibility. Even someone as steady as Kanaya, whose skull will stay inside of her skin forever. Who has been like this for nearly fifty years. Who has the endorsement, and the love, of a literal God. You are acutely reminded, as she smiles pleasantly and helps you into a coat, that all but a fraction of a fraction of her, the very surface, is still unknowable. That your assumptions of her, and of people like her, who are right and brilliant and compelling, the clear heroes of their own stories, continue to be… not always correct.

Underneath the warmth of it, there is something that doesn’t fit, that makes your skin feel too tight in a way you can’t explain. You like her like this, but it’s too gentle to be true. She must be holding something back.

You don’t think it’s any kind of love you’ve ever known, what makes her sort through her closet, looking for something broader in the shoulders for your comfort. You don’t know the word, so how could you describe it? How would you know it if you _had_ seen it before?

Though you’d think you would remember, something like this. Her adjusting your glasses, tidying your hair, patting you on the cheek and sending you off with the repeated instruction to _have fun_ , which _is_ an order. 

You’d think, wouldn’t you.

\---

Despite your notable lack of cardio prowess, relative to both Dirk and basically anyone who may have spent the last few months on a ship deck with scant room for walking around, the trek up to the Queen’s lighthouse courtrooms is far less punishing than ever before. Even without Dirk carrying you.

He offers, but you just laugh and kiss him, right on the temple. Might as well keep getting used to carrying yourself on your own two feet, and as nice as it is to be in his arms, standing level beside him is just as good. In a way.

Not to mention the unfortunate side effect of the reminder of his vast strength and capability, untoward-desire-wise, and the fact that you’re apparently not going to be acting on that desire for the foreseeable future, if Dirk has anything to say about it, which he _does_ , so… walking! Fun, exciting, perilous stone-step walking. As you promised, you _are_ having fun.

It’s a beautiful view of the ocean. From this side of the island, rather than the calm and sheltered harbor near _Starlight’s End_ , the waves are fierce and tumultuous against the high cliffs. They crash and splinter against the rock, and against each other, like vast grey slabs of slate, crumbling and easing back and reforming again to hammer away at the smooth-eroded cliff face. The awesome power of water is very much on full display.

You wonder a little bit if it would be possible to source power generation from the ocean, think for a few seconds about how that would work - the movement of the sea is very different from the wind, maybe a pendulum of some sort rather than a turbine? - get bored, and stare at the little sliver of golden brown skin that goes taut and slack intermittently over Dirk’s shoulderblade above his exposed arm until you forget all about that line of thought. 

Oh fuck, this is doing nothing to help you not want to grasp him by the shoulder, pin him against the sheer rock, kiss him, here and now. You put the kibosh on that whole mental image right away, then go back to staring at his remarkable musculature, for totally innocent reasons. You’re trying to get better at understanding and emulating the way he moves, with both economy and grace, even on the challenging stairs.

What you are doing now is definitely not ogling. Different in all respects. Important physiological inquiry, nothing else.

Neither of you talk very much, except to note potential obstacles. This is fine by you, because your breathing is ragged and gasp-y, and you would just as soon not have him mention it. You _know_ you could probably use more cardio, you’ll _work on it_ , it would just be adding insult to injury to have him bring it up.

The throne room on the ground floor, when you reach it, is largely empty. You’re bound somewhere even further up in the old white stone building, and you bite back a sigh when confronted with _more stairs_. Dirk’s shoulders shake in silent laughter, but he doesn’t comment, except to offer to carry you again. You sigh in exasperation and lead the way up, having regained a little of your breath.

All in all, it’s not the worst afternoon you’ve ever had, and the jaunt is supposed to be of great use to the mission, so you’re not whining about it or anything! Even though you can feel your hair sticking to your forehead and your lungs feel hot and dry by the time you reach the heavy door to the small counsel chamber and state your business.

Could be worse. You pause in the doorframe to offer him a wan, tired smile as you walk in.

“Does she have a reason for sendin’ you two assholes to do her business?” Eridan complains, as the two of you take the seat across from him at an ornately carved mahogany desk, which must have been absolutely _murder_ to transport up the bluff and into the lighthouse.

“The preservation of your life,” Dirk retorts dryly. “Let’s be realistic, man, if Terezi didn’t _somehow_ scare up a legit use for you, your number would’ve been up the second you set foot in the Court. I’ve read too many fuckin’ accounts of your family’s bullshit in the last two days to -”

“Yeah, yeah, I’m aware,” he sighs. “C’mon, Strider, it was over wave before my time. Ain’t my fault she’s got a penchant for makin’ sashimi outta ghosts. Far as I’m concerned, good riddance. Fuck the guy up _extra_ bloody for puttin’ me in this stupid position.”

“Speaking of the guy,” you say, gesturing at the mostly-finished letter sitting before Eridan on his desk, “that’s the business we’re here on. That specific guy, and presumably that specific letter, if you’re just about done?”

He runs a slender hand through his coiffed hair, the movement making the ornaments on his handsome purple tailcoat jingle noticeably, no doubt the _intended_ function of the garment, to be noticeable. It’s almost unbearably ostentatious, presented opposite Dirk’s simple, half-open kimono, but also almost exactly the kind of ostentation that you are rather fond of in your own garments. You feel underdressed, in deck clothes and a full-on _coat_ lent to you by Kanaya, draped around your shoulders now that you’re indoors. You push it away further, freeing your neck and arms, though it’s likely not a very impressive sight.

Fortunate, then, that you have a task to distract you from the fact that you are, agonizingly enough, the least fancied-up person in the room.

“We talked it out a bit the other day. What I got here is basically some bullshit I threw together that should probably hold water. Authentic as _fuck_ , didn’t even havta forge my own signature. You wanna review?”

“I have a literal list of shit she wants included, so yeah, let’s cross-reference,” Dirk says, pulling the paper from the sleeve of his casual walking-around kimono as you lean in curiously to get a better look at Eridan’s writing.

It’s a quite distinctive script, purple and rather spidery but precise. He’s no calligrapher, but he’s got a style, and if there’s anything you can appreciate, it’s style.

“So, we’re establishing here that I got his letter, my spirits are _buoyed_ by the news of his not-deadness, and I’m hookin’ him up with the genuine artifact, a bonafide Aetrian prince. Got a little creative with your backstory, I’m not a _writer_ , but I dabble.”

“Erm, how creative?” you interrupt.

“In your case, I figure fact is stranger than fiction, so here’s the rundown. Kidnapped by insurgent pirates, put together your own crew to reclaim your fortune and scare up the cash for a seaworthy ship to take you home, stoppin’ in with him to trade your Aetrian merch for liquid assets ‘n supplies. No mention of your fucked-over homeland, in case that’s somefin we want to avoid lettin’ on about, or the Gods, in case that’s a tip-off. You’re welcome.”

“Gosh, and that’s hardly even a lie!” you say, impressed. “I just happen to be traveling with sort of the same pirates who consensually kidnapped me!”

“Efficiency,” Dirk agrees. “Okay, so far, so good. There’s some phrasing you need to include to get us through the Dersian naval presence in the area.”

“Not exactly a secret,” Eridan explains, gesturing at the next paragraph with the tip of an impossibly grand feather quill, made of a peacock plume as long as his arm. “Literally just says you’re granted the protection of the oldest and most noble house of Ampora for passage to the Estate, signed, sealed, and guaranteed legit business on behalf of the family. Ain’t like they give these seals to just anyone.”

He shows you a heavy stamp, which appears to confer the same sort of wavy insignia from the pendant, though there is also a rather fearsome-looking seahorse carved in relief, waiting to be pressed into a drip of purple wax.

“Would it be better to claim our signator was your… cousin, or whatever the fuck?” Dirk asks, stroking his jaw with a touch of a squint to his expression, suggesting that he is probably doing something plot-y and unscrupulous. A conclusion that is supported by the fact that he is suggesting a lie. “Would he know you’ve turned coat?”

“Don’t overcomplicate shit,” Eridan argues, setting down both his quill and the letter. “Look, even if I’ve never met the guy, cod-ds are pretty good he’s got a stack of correspondence with my name on it sitting on a desk somewhere, just on account of the family thing. Cronus, too. Think we’re - we _were_ \- the last left alive, or the last operatin’ under the name, but could be mistaken. Lyin’s a crapshoot. Truth-tellin’s slightly less of a crapshoot. Either way, he sent for _me_ , disgrace to the family name or not, so the more above-the-table we can hake this, the better the chances you won’t set off alarm bells before you’re even through the front d-oar.”

“Gotcha,” you say. “Fair enough. Well, is that everything, then?”

“Yeah, ‘less you’ve got somefin you want added before I sign an’ seal it up.”

You exchange looks with Dirk, who’s doing a last review of the list Kanaya left him. He joins you in shrugging.

“Sign away.”

The whole process doesn’t take long at all, and it leaves you with the document you need tucked into the sleeve of Dirk’s kimono. Eridan grumbles a while more about your having disturbed him midway through a vitally important review of the Queen’s inventory, and you note, with some interest, that one piece of parchment near the edge of the desk reveals that _she_ received the funerary shrouds from your crew’s big pile of loot, and what use could she possibly have for those?

He retrieves the paper with a short, appropriately annoyed movement, and asks whether you need anything else from him, since he’s so damn self-sacrificing and his evening is shot already, though he uses a few more ocean-y sounding words to say it.

Dirk seems ready to leave, but you find yourself freshly curious, and presented with an opportunity to learn more things about your adversary - oh, it is a delight to think of yourself having an adversary, how very literary of you! - and seriously consider the questions that’ve been raised by your readings and discussings over the past few days.

“What interest do you have in this outcome?” you ask, after a moment’s thought. “I mean, we’re pillaging and destroying and all, you don’t want to _move in_ to the family home or anything, do you?”

“Inheritance works funny in my family. Gotta krill someone to get their assets, an’ whether or not I’m _technically disowned_ , if I’ve got a hand in it, I can claim rights to the land, assuming you fuckers don’t salt ‘n burn the wholeass thing. Sell it off. Buy some more sick guns. Braggin’ rights. Last one standing.”

“Oh, cool!” you say. “That is sort of how it works for the imperial line in Aetria, though it’s more ceremonial than anything!”

“I sin-seer-ly don’t care.”

“Also cool,” you agree. “You wouldn’t happen to have heard any family stories or whatever about the fellow in question, would you?”

“Nothin’ especially tactically useful, ‘less you’re plannin’ a soiree,” he sighs. “We’re talkin’ washed up, sparkly-clean stories, obviously. To hear my mom talk a-boat the guy, you’d think he was just the nicest fuckin’ dude that ever set a course, guy of the year before he bit it, but I fin-gure that’s not the kinda stuff you’d wanna hear.”

“I don’t know. Try me, unless we’ve something else to do?” you suggest, glancing over at Dirk, who shrugs, leaning back in his seat and watching you appraisingly.

“Whale, fine. My mom actually knew him, back when shit was gettin’ reel. Scary times, to hear her tell it. They shacked her up with her third cousin an’ sent her off to Prospit to hide out with some sympathizers when she was a little kid, ‘n she grew up like that, keepin’ their names a secret. But before that, he was her great uncle or whatever, basically ran the show. Never got over what they did to him way back when, never got married or had a kid of his own, far as I know. S’posedly the whole thing where the help murdered half the estate, including the last parent he had left, n’ fucked off in the middle of the night kinda did a number on him.”

“The slaves,” Dirk corrects him, a muscle standing out in his jaw. “The people who were enslaved.”

Eridan waves his hand around, as though to say ‘whatever’.

“Still a helluva guy, again, in _her subjective opinion_ , Strider, c’mon, you think I’m stupid? Back in the day, we were practically royalty. He was brought up like the heir to a fuckin’ empire, ‘cause that’s what he was. An’ it was what she wanted for me, too. But look how well that-all worked out. Don’t go in there expectin’ he’s gonna act like any of these uncultured jackasses, s’all I’m sayin’. Even if that’s the impression Kan wants to give, like he’s some sorta animal. Not seine it’s not true, but she’s got a pretty legit motive to make him seem shittier than he is.”

He situates his shiny black boots on the edge of the desk, lounging back in his seat. As he moves, the ornaments on his vividly purple tailcoat jingle.

“That what you’re lookin’ for? He sent her fuckin’ birthday gifts, even while she was in hidin’, till he died. Or didn’t.”

“Huh. I suppose so?” you say, wishing you had more time to think through that. Dirk is near-audibly grinding his teeth, though, so you figure you should probably wrap up. “Really, thank you for your help on this.”

“She’s got me over a barrel, I wouldn’t be associatin’ with any of you unless I had to. But you’re welcome,” he sighs. “Tell Vris I say ‘fuck you’.”

You have to halfway drag Dirk out of the room to prevent him from escalating the situation. At times, his talent for escalation is admirable and more than a little enviable, but when you are struggling to haul him bodily out a heavy door, it is a little less of a delight, you must concede.

“It’s just -” he insists, raking his hand through his hair as you follow him dutifully down the stairs, once he’s taken a second to cool off after calling Eridan several names. “Look, _you’re_ living proof that you can come out of a - that coming from a background like that doesn’t inherently make you a flippant piece of shit about serious fucking… you get that, right? He doesn’t _have_ to front like that, he’s just a narcissistic, melodramatic _dipshit_ and he’d be just as bad as his however-many-greats uncle if he had a fucking _ounce_ of power that wasn’t on Terezi’s orders.”

“I do think he can still hear us,” you say, ushering him along down the stairs.

“I fucking hope he can!”

“Also, dear heart, I don’t think I should probably be your rhetorical standard for not-being-an-irredeemable-sociopath, just… word of advice,” you add, laughing uneasily. His misplaced faith in your faculties worries you more than anything, in this and in every other respect.

“You’d have every right to be a fuckton worse,” he complains. “Than you are. Than he is! Fucker spent a decade doing maritime war crimes for fun and profit before someone figured out he was forging papers for the Court’s stolen shit and _that_ was what they got him on. Terezi’s been coddling him ever since because he smells nice and he shoots whatever she points vaguely at without asking questions. Worst thing that’s ever happened to him is a Dersian court summons.”

“And, presumably, whatever got his eye scarred up,” you add, very charitably, you think.

Dirk snorts, but doesn’t reply. You assume, on that basis, that while there might be yet another account of misery and woe there, it is likely eclipsed by his own tragic backstory. And you don’t want to hear any more of those, if you can avoid it. It has been kind of a jam-packed week for tales of human suffering.

When you spill out onto the volcanic rock, outside of the throne room, you take a moment to catch your breath. Not from the climb, but from the everything else. Dirk looks appropriately abashed at your discomfited affect, and you slide to a seat with your back against the white stone exterior of the lighthouse.

He joins you, after a second.

“You alright?” he asks, nudging you with his shoulder.

“Mostly,” you sigh, but don’t elaborate.

The wind whips over the mostly-barren volcanic stone, whistling through crevices and mingling with the ferocious sound of the sea meeting the rocks below.

“I’m not going to leave your side in there for a second,” he says, reaching for your hand. “I’ll get creative with _my_ backstory. Your tragically besotted manservant, abandoning a life of murder and debauchery for a glimpse of your smile. I’d totally eat my own obi for a chance to sleep at the foot of your bed.”

“Oh, put a lid on it,” you laugh. The image is actually hilarious. “I just don’t much like the ambiguity, that’s all. Had enough of it.”

“The only people who are done with ambiguity are chilling at the Isle, dude. That’s life.” He encloses your hand in his own, warming you against the wind. You’re dressed properly for it, the wool coat does an excellent job of keeping you cozy against the sea breeze, but it’s still welcome. His palms are rough and warm. “Look, Eridan gets on my nerves, and that’s probably on purpose, because he categorically sucks. But you were smart to ask. We can’t be unprepared for Dualscar. Neither of us.”

“She told me, sort of, that he’d be… smart,” you say vaguely, not wanting to talk about Kanaya too much if you can get out of it. “He wasn’t telling me anything I couldn’t have put together myself.”

Neither of you immediately say anything further. It’s a beautiful autumn evening. Aetria doesn’t have well-defined, neatly delineated seasons; this is the closest you’ve gotten, yet, to a proper winter. Somehow, he’s still got that one shoulder out, acting like he’s not even cold. Perhaps not while you’re in motion, but keeping him here, stationary in the shadow of the lighthouse, that can’t be good.

“Let’s head back,” you suggest, wriggling free of his grip and making your way to your feet, feeling weirdly boneless after the long day, the strenuous exertion, the… everything of it.

He follows you easily as you straighten your hair and fret a tad over the coat, feeling lumpy and ungainly in a way that is genuinely stressing you out. It still bothers you, being anything less than attractive, and it doesn’t help that he keeps shooting you these cautious looks, leaving space between you as you begin the walk down the white stone steps, like he expects you to spontaneously combust if he gets too close.

With the way you’re shivering, spontaneous combustion sounds plenty good so far as ideas go.

The pink-gold glow of the sunset warms your face, and it’s an easier walk, downhill. Almost leisurely. Weirdly relaxing? It’s pleasant to watch the waves, lit up in the same vibrant hues as the sky, crash and tear at the rocky shore, visible but distant. You _do_ find yourself missing your life at sea. A lot seemed simpler, then. That was illusory, but it was a nice illusion.

You come to a halt on the steps, watching as the sun begins to sink into the horizon. Dirk stops short of you, turning to watch as well.

In the slanted light of the setting sun, his dark eyes turn to a honeyed amber. His face, the long stretch of bare skin, all golden, like he’s glowing from the inside. It is honestly criminal that he looks this breathtakingly handsome and you can’t get all hot and heavy with him without hitting the hellaciously derailing _snag_ that is ‘his morals’.

“Tired yet?” he asks, looking down at you surreptitiously through his eyelashes, which he should not legally be allowed to do.

“Like you wouldn’t believe,” you sigh. “Today has been a long year.”

“Tell me about it. The offer to carry you back to the Court like the world’s most dignified sack of potatoes is standing as long as I am, FYI.”

The worst part is, even after all the lovely clothing you’ve worn today - perhaps especially, you got _used_ to it, feeling how you used to all the time - you’re _comparatively_ large and unsightly. How stupid is it, dressing up all nice for a horrible slaver and not for your own boyfriend? It’s a nice enough coat, but it’s still all over you, messing up your lines completely, and he’s… glistening, for pete’s sake!

You sigh, long-suffering and morose as can be, and turn to face him.

“I don’t know if you could,” you announce. “I’ve filled out, you know, and in this horrible coat -”

“Ohhhhh, that’s a stupid thing to say if you don’t want me to do it,” he chuckles, knocking you off your feet, catching you by the shoulders and bolstering your knees with his other arm, lifting you up like a ragdoll despite the perilous height, like he doesn’t even see it.

Well, you do, and you squeak in a decidedly undignified manner as you promptly throw your arms around his neck for stability.

As though he’d ever drop you.

Once he’s actually got you, you can no longer remember why you didn’t want it. It is such a pleasant way to be carried, and you feel all-over safe and cozied up, your face nestled into his neck, which makes him shiver. It must be horribly ticklish.

You’ll never stop enjoying this, the power coiled in his arms and the way he uses it to keep you safe and comfortable and so close that you can feel his heartbeat, gently affix your mouth to his pulse point and _taste_ it -

He yelps in response to that, so you suppose you can’t actually do that without causing the both of you to tumble into the sharp rocks of the shore. The Sea King would probably understand. You are in love with him. What else are you supposed to do?

Unfortunately, he does not agree with that assessment, though he smiles in an appropriately sappy sort of way when you insist that you are not ‘trying to kill him’.

You just love him, that’s all.

“Same thing, with you, I swear to fuck,” he grumbles through his totally-not-still-a-smile, and kisses you on top of the head as you duck down to let him.

\---

Dirk holds to his promise to sing to you each night. While the sealant on your guitar is still drying on the first night, he offers you his hand, nonetheless, and you join him on the roof for some vestige of privacy and decidedly more than a vestige of singing. It’s a clear, starry night, and few lights burn visibly in the Court, a couple of the orangey streetlamps the only source of terrestrial illumination.

You feel like you could practically count them all, the endless array of twinkling stars, if you had the time. With your head on his chest, listening as he sings softly, feeling it as much as hearing the quiet lyrics, you feel like you might. They are infinite, but so is the cool, crisp, beautiful stillness of the moment, punctuated only by the warmth of his arms around you.

While he starts with a few that you know, all of which bring a blush to your cheeks, fortuitously invisible in the low light of the Court when shrouded in darkness, he segues to some you don’t understand. A few in his native language, then another one entirely, the lyrics of which he tells you he picked up from the woman chained beside him while he was imprisoned on a slaving ship.

“She’d sing until she passed out every night,” he tells you. “Soft enough that only the people right next to her could hear. Still don’t know what language it was. Couldn't say what happened to her, either. Hope she made it home.”

He can lecture on about it as often as he wants, how some of the random factoids _you_ drop about your early life make his insides twist and burn for want of vengeance, but you know that feeling just as well on his behalf. And maybe you appreciate Vriska a little more, for killing the people who put him there. The sort of people who would ever put a man such as him in chains. Hardly people at all.

“Don’t mean to get dark,” he adds, when he notices your slight hunch-forward, the way the thought upsets you. “Seriously, it doesn’t hurt anymore, remembering it. The songs were nice. My parents didn’t sing.”

You sort of nod, your brow furrowing, though you don’t ultimately have much to say about that. Just lean up against him, feeling queasy at your impulsive rush of gratitude for your own upbringing, for the fact that you _can’t_ fathom it, what all of your friends have described at one point or another. Squalid below-deck conditions, heavy shackles, the scars of which have faded drastically but will likely never disappear. Shadows around Dirk’s wrists, lines of keloid tissue on Aradia’s shoulders.

Of course, it’s the most natural thing in the world to feel grateful at the vast gulf that separates you from them. It would be almost degrading to draw any kind of comparison where there is patently none to be found.

In the early years, before you were technically of age to be conscripted as a proper litgamella, when you were housed with the caro supellecta, you all spoke the same language - well, you spoke a few more than any of them did, but you were all taught to read and write in addition to devotional curriculum and all that - but there was precious little singing or comforting or anything of that sort. An awful lot of quiet huddling, as you recall, once the lights were out. Everything seemed so dire, then. To you as much as to anyone.

You didn’t have the context that you do now, of course. How much worse it could have been!

“What’re you thinking about?” Dirk asks, gone silent as well, only his steady breathing still brushing your shoulder with each exhale.

“Childhood stuff, I guess?” you say. “Where we all come from.”

“Oh,” he says. “Good memories?”

“Sort of,” you sigh. “Good is relative. Everything is relative. Nothing really means anything else but what it _is_ , when you think about it for long enough. I think most philosophy and whatnot is rather bunk, honestly. Trying to generalize when there’s no truthful way to generalize anything, ever, at all.”

Dirk snorts, hoisting you into his lap as you shriek in protest, _very_ concerned that he’s bitten off more than he can chew and is about to tumble down off the roof and into the canal with you in his arms. This proves kind of a silly concern. Like many of your concerns.

He sets his chin atop your head, holding you as close as he can get you. Willingly, you nestle back against him. He’s very warm.

“I think there’s something to be said for acknowledging that most stuff is fundamentally unknowable - like, fuck, I’m never going to completely _get_ why we’ve got an octopus-lady stewarding the oceans with weird time magic, apparently, a guy could go crazy trying to make sense of the mechanics of that aspect of our existence alone - and still trying to figure out the important shit. I can’t step outside of myself and _understand_ how the world looks to you, or Vriska, or Roxy, or anyone, but I can try. And I’ll keep trying, and hopefully getting closer to something true, and someday the Dead King’ll take me and that’ll be the end of it.”

“A little morbid,” you protest. “That is actually sort of a depressing thing to say, Dirk, what’s the point in doing things when you know they won’t _work_?”

“Everybody dies, dude,” he says. “Ain’t depressing, just a fact.”

“Not Kanaya,” you argue, shifting around and trying to face him. “And p’rhaps I’ll be able to finagle something similar, don’t count me out!”

He laughs, and his chest rises and falls out of synchrony with his even inhales and exhales, and you pout until he kisses you on the cheek in silent apology.

“I’ll never count you out.”

You groan and squirm away even further.

“Maybe you should, I don’t know. Ugh. Why is everything so difficult all the time for no reason, since you’re apparently so well-versed in the intricacies of the universe and whatever the fuck?”

“Okay, you want my theory? So there’s a fifth King, and it’s the King of Fucking Up Dirk Strider’s Life Personally, and maybe you’ve got one too, who knows, but the gist of it is, this actual god exists solely to -”

“Give it a rest, for heaven’s sake,” you protest. “Dirk, I was asking a very serious and straightforward question, _obviously_.”

“Hey, I had a point. _I’m_ the shitty fuckup god, the god is me.”

“That’s even stupider, dear heart. You have never ever been anything resembling a fuckup. Or a god, thank fuck.”

“You wound me, English,” he says gravely, then kisses the top of your head. “Just for that, I’m smiting the shit out of you.”

“Do your Gods smite?” you ask, suddenly curious. “Was that what they were doing in La Ansephemine, _smiting_?”

“I don’t know. That’s not the sort of lore I get into, though I probably should, given the increasing potential relevance, now that my boyfriend is going after _another_ King’s powers.”

“Hey, I’m doing nothing of the sort!” you object. “I’m doing something similar, but very different, in a variety of important respects. Zero thievery! Maximum, uh, strategic ingratiation _and befriendment_ of a deity and summary request-making. Totally by the book.”

“Sure. Yeah, still going to check out the ‘smiting’ section of the Kingcyclopedia.”

“There’s a Kingcyclopedia?”

“I fuckin’ wish,” he sighs. “Ask Kanaya for me when you get the chance, figure she’s the closest thing we got.”

For a while, you sit cozily in his lap as he holds you close, absentmindedly stroking your shoulder as you cuddle up. A cold wind whistles through the streets of the Velvet Court. The orange glow of salt lamps ripples over the dark canals, and the city sings quietly back. Dirk’s singing has long since dissolved into a kind of affectionate hum, vibrating in his chest and warming your back.

You stretch, trying to get closer to him, though you are as content as a horse grazing in a field of clover. The reassuring glow of his undivided attention is as good as a meal, a blanket around your shoulders, a hot drink on a cold night.

“You’re not trying to _fuck the Sea King_ ,” he says abruptly, and you laugh so hard that you nearly have to brace yourself against the tiles of the roof to avoid rolling out of his grasp.

“Gosh, no, _never_ , what must you think of me! I’m entirely too fond of her for any such nonsense,” you snort, then pause, stock-still.

He goes silent as well, for a moment, then gathers you back up and resumes stroking your shoulder as though nothing happened, much to your relief. You stay out for a while longer, sometimes chatting, sometimes just considering the view of the horizon, the slowly dimming lights and darkening windows of the Court. The township falls asleep, and eventually your head becomes too heavy to hold up, making it too dangerous to stay out any longer.

This is something you’ll miss, once you’re out to sea, and you hold onto each second, clutch it to your chest, as though this time with him is some kind of small and frightened animal that will make a frantic bid for escape the second you let it go.

But you _don’t_ let go, and he doesn’t, either.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Part 2 coming within a day or two. I swear to fuck, they're getting on the boat.
> 
> Edit: I can't recommend blithely fixing one dropped tag at two in the morning. Formatting should be fixed!


	11. Somio (or, a lullaby for would-be pirates) Part 2

Your days, packed practically to the gills, pass much like those at sea. Moments seem unfathomably long; at the same time, you can’t entirely remember what you were doing an hour ago, what you had for breakfast, or what you’re supposed to be doing next. Luckily, you have your crewmates to assist, and you get the sense that your share of the burden of preparation is largely opt-in.

But you do opt in. You opt right the fuck in at every possible opportunity. Running documents for Kanaya, carting meals down to the docks at dusk, scrubbing dinner dishes even though it chafes your hands dreadfully. This leaves basically no time for lingering appreciation of the contours of Dirk’s neck, which is a shame, but also has you too worked up about other things, and exhausted besides, for it to be much of a tragedy when you fall asleep, wrapped up together, but chaste as a couple of kittens in a tired, fluffy pile. 

Rather than lingering in your bed, you zip downstairs along with Dirk come morning to help with breakfast, to hear and summarily zone out during the day’s schedule, delivered by Karkat, and to wonder vaguely what someone will next suggest you consider doing.

It’s nothing you’d describe as easy, but it is a kind of distraction that you find familiar. You’re well aware that no one in their right mind would put you in a position where your messing up would have actual consequences, and the crew seems cognizant of the kinds of tasks for which you are suited. More than previously, sure! But not all.

That’s alright. You’ve come to terms with your place in things, and not super in a denial-way, you don’t think. There’s still an awful lot to learn, and a morning stretches easily into weeks, or so it feels.

Mr. Zahhak swings by for the promised practical-skills demonstration of Dersian etiquette. You join him in full regalia and bearing a pot of tea brewed in the kitchens, at which point he stammers for a solid minute before Dirk, working on your guitar in the corner, watching the proceedings with hawklike intensity, intervenes.

You learn an awful lot of nonsense about Dersian gender roles, which strike you as utter frippery. Apparently, it’s at least a little odd and uncharacteristically ‘feminine’ for you to be wearing a skirt, which couldn’t be further from a useful designation, since clothing indicates chosen role through its general flounciness and utility or lack thereof, nothing rigidly to do with specific _garment shapes_. You make what you think is a brilliant case for your perspective, centered on the fact that Dirk often wears a skirt, kimono _definitely_ are dress-analogous in _form_ , and he is the most masculine man you’ve ever encountered. This argument extends altogether too long. Dirk is forced to abandon his work and to duck out to splash cold water on his face, and Mr. Zahhak is unconvinced.

Oh well. You familiarize yourself with Dersian teatime customs, and nearly have to be restrained before you’ll permit Roxy to join the roleplay and _pour for you_ , acting the part of the attendant maid, despite the fact that she is not the person who _made the tea_ , which is an even more insane cultural practice than prescriptively gendering basic articles of clothing and possibly up there with the widespread-societal-tolerance-of-slavery thing.

Dirk and Roxy laugh when you make this observation; Kanaya, looking on with her own cup of tea, does not.

She does, however, compliment your tea, which has you glowing with delight for the next ten minutes.

By the time you’re tidying up after the luncheon - possibly the most bizarre you’ve ever experienced - Dirk has set your guitar aside to dry off, and he waves you away when you try to scootch over and take a peek.

“Not done yet,” he informs you, the corner of his mouth tightened into a slight smile. “C’mon. Trust the process.”

You have no reason to trust the process, and you tell him so. Your eyes, on the other hand? Eminently trustworthy. Then you make grabby hands in the direction of the instrument until he kisses you, and a solid 50% of the thoughts that you’re trying to avoid come flooding back. Not the bad ones, but the sticky-sweet _want_ , boiling hot, a cauldron of scalding molasses in your chest, all the more difficult to bear for having been neglected. Which is its own weird kind of ‘bad’, when you think about it. A reminder of just how bound up you are in that kind of wanting, always just beneath the surface. Fear that it might transfer, somehow, infect your other burgeoning loves, if you aren’t careful.

It’s already been so poisonous to you and him, how devastatingly and wholly you want him. Sometimes to the exclusion of everything else. There is so much else to it, on top of it, so many things to love, piled on with both hands. But if you turn over the heap of bricks, there is something slowly decaying underneath, and it isn’t _him_ rotted through.

So it _is_ bad, no matter how good it seems.

You sigh and feign a melodramatic collapse, draping your hand over your face with an elegant cant to your wrist so you don’t have to mind your expression so closely. Watching him through your slightly splayed fingers.

“I shall faint dead away,” you announce, “for wont of seeing the product of your labors.”

“Ain’t very Dersian-nobleman of you,” he retorts, still smiling, somehow. “Duel me for it.”

“I reserve the right to choose a champion, thank you very much, and if you think I’m selecting anyone other than you for the job, I’m afraid you’ve got another thing coming.” You sit up and cross your arms, resolute, clearly at a hypothetical impasse in this imaginary argument.

“Come on, Jake, pick me!” Roxy calls. “I’ve been waiting for a reason to kick his ass!”

“Glad someone here is thinking rationally,” you agree. “Roxy, please do the honors and marmalize this fellow until he sees sense and gives me back my guitar.”

“Cheap trick, and it ain’t gonna work. I’ll just show _her_ and die a martyr. Cut me, and I bleed the blood of a craftsman.”

“Do put a cork in it, you’re being very melodramatic about this, totally unprompted, and it’s a little silly.” He’s trying to make you laugh, which will inevitably distract you, and you aren’t having it _at all_. Yes, it’s worked every other time, but not this time, damn it, you want to see, you _know_ it’s magnificent.

“I sweat the sweat of a gentle soul.”

“For fuck’s sake, Dirk.”

“And I weep the tears -”

“Just tell me you didn’t give the horses weirdly muscular biceps in place of forearms,” you huff. He wouldn’t have, right? “They are such magnificent, fine-boned beasts, the abs were horrible but it would be practically _sacrilege_ , you know, to touch their legs.”

“No promises. Besides, it’s not done yet. Don’t give me ideas.”

“ _Dirk!_ ”

“Not that this isn’t the most charming argument ever, but holy shit,” Roxy interrupts, and you go _very_ red in the face. “If I have to sit through this on the ship, I’m jumpin’ overboard and the Sea King can sort me out however she wants.”

“Like you aren’t looking for an excuse. We all know you’re into the tentacles,” Dirk fires back, effortlessly shifting gears.

“Yeah, ‘cause I’m not a _coward_. C’mon, seriously, can’t we do something fun in the ten minutes we aren’t scheduled? Me and Vriska and Aradia were gonna go shoot bottles on the wall, for super serious mission-prep reasons and not because it’s fun, and I’d _kill_ to have Jake along with.” She winks at you; you bite your lip, unsure of yourself, but liking the idea of a day trip. “I guess you can come too,” she adds, as Dirk opens his mouth to complain. “Bring your new weapons, we’ve gotta test out the guns we stole from the floaty city!”

For the rest of the afternoon, you forget about the guitar. Reluctant as you are to actually join in, it’s nice to be with so many of your friends, and also Vriska, sort of. She adapts more quickly to target shooting than the rest of them; you think that’s because of the one-eye thing, better disposed to aim using the sight rather than the more combat-y tactic of focusing at what you’re trying to hit while in motion.

Roxy is objectively excellent, and Aradia more than holds her own as they shatter a long line of empty bottles set up along the wall that surrounds the Court, sending multicolored glass flying every which way. For once, Dirk is not the best at something, though he’s _good_ , without a doubt.

Vriska is Vriska; she crows in delight when her shots decimate a bottle, which is most times that she shoots, and largely ignores you, save to comment on the fact that you aren't shooting until Dirk gives her A Look and she announces that it would be cheating, anyway, if you played, since you're clearly aiming with residual Star King power.

This ignites a passionate debate about whether or not her abilities would linger, which you put to rest as best you can. You've _always_ been very good at shooting, thank you kindly! And you can prove it, too. You help Dirk with his next few shots, make him hold his body properly and aim like he isn't in the middle of pitched battle, _one eye_ , that's best for distance. He struggles to orient his pistol the right way - again, you remind him that he's not trying to kill someone, he is trying to _target shoot_ , and you explain, a little hesitantly, how it works. How to call the target with your presence, to know where you are and where it is and chart a path from the sight to the center by feeling your way there, atom to atom.

He does better, under your hand, and grins rather goofily the whole time. You're just baffled by the fact that he does what you say, and off-balance enough at the realization that your weird vague advice can be sort of helpful that you wind up taking a few shots with Aradia's _incredibly cool_ coelitrovic handgun, a thing of great beauty, emblazoned with gilded skulls arranged ergonomically around the ebony grip. She is very, very good at stealing cool things. You make sure to tell her so.

It's just _fun_. A little break from all the muchness, and well-needed, besides. You stop being quite so crazy about the guitar, and accept a tour of the Ascension, near-finished and loaded, while the rest of the crew fetches laundry.

On sum, it may be the nicest evening you've passed in recent memory.

\---

The finished guitar is possibly the most beautiful thing you’ve ever laid eyes on. And it’s _yours_ , smooth and perfectly-weighted and fitting just right in your lap, like it’s practically made for you. He gives it back to you in your room, in the soft glow of lamplight, with another night still remaining before departure.

His smile is sincere and hopeful. You find it a unique delight, how much he tries to emote around you. It doesn’t always work, in part because you don’t think it comes naturally to him, like at all. But he tries. He is trying really, really hard to make this work.

He's imagined a sunlit scene, a valley strewn with wildflowers. Much to your relief, the horses look like horses. Much to your delight, they are so much more than horses. He's used gold leaf to great effect, both in shaping out a brilliant sun that encompasses half the face, and extending the effect to the grazing horses themselves. A bay, two black stallions drinking from a river, and a beautiful little dapple grey with an arching neck and a delicate face in the foreground. You love it instantly and fiercely.

Running your fingertips reverently over the strings, you observe the the instrument is in tune. You no doubt have Aradia or Roxy to thank for that; it’s not that Dirk is tuneless, but you doubt he’d trust himself to do this part of things. Everything you care about, increasingly, is wrapped up in many sets of hands.

You beam up at him, caught between throwing your arms around his shoulders and cradling your guitar like an infant. He notices your dilemma, resolving it for you by leaning in to stroke your cheek, kissing the warm place left by his touch.

“Sing with me?” he offers, and you nod eagerly, wanting to try your gift out properly.

On the roof, you warm up with the usual itinerary, riding high on the elation of holding your instrument and being held by him. You must be emboldened by the whole thing, even more weirdly buoyant than his company usually makes you, because you feel over-full of love, or _something_ , and you want to spill it out more than you want to not make a fool of yourself.

“Would you want to hear a song in Aetrian?” you ask.

His eyes gleam in the silvery moonlight, pooling like a pair of luminescent mirrors before cloud cover veils him once again in darkness. You can’t quite make out his expression, but you can see them crinkle at the edges, the way the shape changes as he smiles.

“Yeah, I would.”

For no real reason, you feel defensive of the words before you even begin to form them, as your fingertips find their places and you begin to put the chords together by ear. It’s childish; it’s a lullaby. You don’t know many other songs from home well enough to actually _sing_ them except the weird religious ones. And he means to learn to speak it, someday, maybe, unless he was kidding about that, so you can no longer count on him never knowing what you’re saying, one less easy barrier between him and what you might not be ready to share.

It is a little scary.

Maybe he can tell, despite the inky darkness of the night, only the occasional glimpse of the moon to make each other even slightly visible. Because he squeezes your arm affectionately, but says nothing to hurry you along.

Your voice is hesitant as you begin to sing over the strumming of your guitar, once you find your key.

[[Tune: Ninna Nanna]](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vynPmUJEG_c)

Beva nati, vic a somio  
Chanto alla na adderivo

Beva nati, vic a somio  
Duervio si ama se sicuro

Somio, somio

Isel na veglia si vattino  
Tenavicci ni le sotricon  
Iluna se pretigio  
Imana la d’vare se tina

Somio, somio

Beva nati, vic a somio  
Chanto alla na adderivo

Aldea se sipri deia  
Tocc’ somore se salvecho

Somio, somio

Beva nati, vic a somio

Much to your relief, he doesn’t immediately ask you what it means. You keep right on playing, and maybe that cuts him off from his questions, though his breathing doesn’t change, there’s no telltale indication of something left unsaid. You feel a little lightheaded from singing, and have to catch your breath.

Your careful fingerwork peters out, and you’re shrouded in lambent moonlight, what little manages to flicker through the ebb and flow of cottony clouds. It reflects only mutely off the finished surface of the guitar’s body. Your hand drifts from the strings to trace the faintly visible outlines of dancing horses, edged in gold. A slightly different reflection of the ambient glow lets you find them.

It’s the nicest thing you’ve ever owned. You might owe him for this. If you didn’t already owe him everything for everything. If there were anything he’d just _take_. You wish, for a moment, that you had something else nice, so you could give it to him.

He knows your books, though, he’s read most of them and you’d already resolved to share the others. Everything that’s yours is already his. You share the same clothing; he’d have no use for the garb you plan to wear to dinner and whatnot at the Ampora Estate, and while you paid for it, technically, it doesn’t feel like yours to give away. To ease the entr'acte the two of you have going on in order to thank him, to give him something more of your body, while you’re sure you could pull it off, would amount to a knife in the back. Because he doesn’t think of it like that, as something with an exchange value.

The guitar doesn’t have an exchange value either. It is just something you’ll never be able to not-have, anymore, without missing it.

Then again, you thought you’d miss your mother more than you do. Like needles in the gut, like knives pricking up at the soles of your feet, sure. But not every second. You’ve put her in a different box, and have been busily at work filling the vacancy, haven’t you?

If she could die, and you’ve gone months without sobbing your eyes out over it, would it matter if anyone did? Sure, but not forever. Right now, the lacquered body in your lap feels like everything, but would it kill you to lose it? It would hurt, and you would build a new box to conceal and forget the memory in the corner with the rest.

You feel a precipitous need to exist in the present, and you haul yourself out of your own head, digging your fingertips into the frets. A little pain helps. He’s still there, his hand still on your waist, steady as stone, warm, the roughness of his palms palpable even through the fabric of your shirt. You weren’t quiet for too long, you hope.

“Where’d you learn that one?” he asks, catching on as you turn in his lap to try to get a look at his face.

“It’s a children’s song, the sort of thing a nursemaid might sing while putting you to bed,” you explain. “Somio is about the most true-to-type of the genre. Anyone raised in Aetria would know it.”

“I think I could parse about fifteen percent of that from cognates with Common,” he says thoughtfully. “With context, I mean. Could guess on maybe half.”

“D’you want me to write it out for you, do a nice word-for-word translation to get you started?”

“If you’re down, that’d be a great place to start. I started learning Common from songs, anyway. Helps with pronunciation a fuckton.”

“Mm.” You make a quiet noise of agreement. That will be nice, to have a task.

You’re aware that Aetrian and Common are something like _very_ distant cousins; it’s not the most difficult language out there to acquire, makes pretty good sense in terms of word-units, a lot of fun cognates, as he mentioned, along with plenty of false ones. Where Aetrian tends towards literal function-based identifying nouns, and has a rigid internal system of reflexives and word-orders, Common is kind of all over the place. That made it a challenge to read, of course, but there were dictionaries to be obtained and tutors to be bribed and all sorts of work-arounds. Stacks upon stacks of books with pictures. You never got _that_ into Aetrian literature. Everything going on outside of home seemed so much more exciting.

That has rather borne out in practice, heh. Never a dull moment since you stowed away.

After all this murder-pillage-intrigue is done, you think you may sleep for a week straight. Just to remember what that’s like. Back at the temple, it would’ve been easy to get yourself a break, if you wanted one. Merely jam a new piercing in, no use for you for a while, nothing to be done about it. After doing it so often in ceremony during training, you could easily finagle it yourself. A lot easier, actually, without the audience. Before you were technically old enough to be housed with other litgamella, your roommates in the caro supellecta did so often enough, though you were never brave or desperate enough to take part. You didn’t narc on them, at least. Probably would have, if anyone had asked, but you liked to pretend that they were your friends.

It was difficult to bridge that gap, though, knowing you were going somewhere different than they were. That when they came of age, they would be sent off to some patron household, and you would begin your training in earnest. You came and went more or less as you pleased, since you were so near the palace grounds and it wasn’t as though anyone would _stop_ you. The caro supellecta did not.

You were literate from the start; few of them could read before internment at the temple, and this gave you rather a leg up in lessons, a much-needed bolster to your confidence, but hardly endearing to your classmates. It wasn’t like it wasn’t obvious that you were receiving special treatment; the devotional instructors and priests alike handled you with kid gloves, wouldn’t think of putting a mark on you, even for sneaking out, so long as you were back for class.

Piercings are more a mark of membership in the caro supellecta than any other kind of social role, though more than a few litgamella have a handful as well, including mother. Er. _Had._. She was something of a trailblazer in terms of their quantity, though, at least in your echelon.

Dirk sighs, and you feel it through his chest.

“You know what’s coming. It’s Q-and-A time with Dirk and Jake. What’s going on inside your head? You’ve got the look.”

“I do?” you ask, curious. Usually you don’t lose track of anything to do with _how you look_ , but this catches you sincerely off your guard.

“Yeah. I want to know what you’re thinking when you get all glassy-eyed. Also all the time. If you could just voice a stream of consciousness, actually, a few years of that and I think I’d have everything figured out.”

“Nothing good,” you sigh. Alright, yes, you _can_ think yourself into knots. The idea of anyone else being privy to those thoughts, even Dirk - especially Dirk - is utterly untenable. Half the time your thoughts are _wrong_ , anyway, you’ve established that. You’re not very good at knowing what you feel. Your lack of self-knowledge is only surpassed by your utter paucity of anything-else-knowledge.

“Oh, okay, self-deprecation, I know _that_ look.”

You turn back to him, askance.

“Dirk, there is absolutely no way on this green earth that you can tell that from my eyes or whatever the hell.”

“Right, there isn’t. You said the first bit out loud, I extrapolated. Seriously, I want to know. Don’t have to tell me everything, but give me _something_ , here.”

“Ugh. It’s not that simple!” you insist. “I think about lots of stuff, alright? Really, I think I’ve got a ping pong ball between my ears instead of one of those wrinkly pink things. And lately, it keeps pinging and ponging back to meaningless old topics at the most inopportune moments. One second it’s random-ass childhood memories, the next it’s… just the silliest meta-thinking nonsense you can imagine. Horses and friends and why I did the stupid things I did and thought the stupid things I thought when I was a child. Does that sate your curiosity?”

“My curiosity about you is insatiable.”

“Well, there’s no accounting for taste,” you huff. Gosh, but you were trying to be kind and grateful and fawningly complimentary and deserving, weren’t you? Well, you’ve mucked that up too. Nice going, once again. “Sorry. I keep slipping up. In the dumbest ways. I’ve just got to pull my head out of my own ass, ideally before we all get on a boat and go do something that is actually of consequence rather than treading water here for an eternity and a half.”

“Y’know, I think the best thing I ever did for myself was kicking my own ass ‘till I stopped thinking about it like that,” he laughs.

“Huh? Like what?” you ask, not thinking you said anything particularly stupid, that time, at least.

“Like this part of things is useless. We’re not making any money, we’re not… I dunno, taking insane risks and _testing our abilities_ and however the shit my thirteen-year-old self was determined to get himself killed. So, what, it doesn’t matter? Every second I’ve got with you is _of consequence_. Every second I’m alive. But especially the ones where I get to… actually talk with you. Get to know your heart a little better. Get a little closer to seeing your soul. No such thing as a meaningless story, so far as I’m concerned. It’s all connected. Can’t have swashbuckling adventures on the high seas without all the other parts.”

“Doesn’t mean you have to dwell on them,” you argue. “I’d just as soon skip to the part where I’m, I don’t know, making eyes at ol’ Lord Dualscar over the evening repast, and then Kanaya pops out with a knife or whatever and slices him up like one of Roxy’s roast geese, and then we’re stealing heaps of jewels and probably making passionate love in a pile of rare silks, and that’s the whole thing.”

“Great ideas, all of ‘em,” he says, twining his fingers with yours, which have gone tense and shaky over the frets. “But we also gotta live in the in-between bits. And that means figuring our bullshit out before it eats us alive. Sorry, bro. Story doesn’t end when we sail off, does it.”

“Maybe it would be easier if it did,” you sigh. “It sure does seem like most of this whole thing, this between-adventures stuff, is just boredom and trouble and making up petty little conflicts for ourselves, none of which _need_ to be aired out.”

“Nothing wrong with resting on your laurels a bit, but that’s also not how anything works. Nothing’s over till it’s over, and it’s not _over_ until you’re at the Isle, and knowing us, fuck, destiny probably won’t be finished with us then, either. But there’s no climax without a buildup. Gotta start earning the next happy ending. Hell, I hope this round isn’t anywhere near as fucking insane as everything that happened on La Ansephemine. I hope all this buildup is for nothing, and the wholeass denouement is just all of us sitting around thinking about what to do now that we’re the richest and most well-adjusted pirates in the world. Uh. Knock on wood.”

He raps his knuckles on the body of your guitar.

“Anyway, I want to hear how you’re planning on pulling your head out of your ass. No shortcuts, don’t dumb it down into some vague shit. Gory details. I can rob a slaver any fuckin’ day I like, but that kinda show? A meticulous, metaphorical colonic cranioectomy by my beloved? Lay it out for me, baby. My heart’s throbbing dick has never been harder.”

“Glad someone is enjoying my agony,” you grouse. “Also, ew. You should get that checked out, dearest, I don’t think hearts are supposed to do that.”

“I actually _am_ serious, overextended metaphor notwithstanding.” He kisses the top of your head.

“I know. So am I, I think,” you say doubtfully. “I don’t know if I’m quite there yet.”

But whatever ‘there’ is, you do have the acute sense that you are getting closer to it. It’s not something you especially want to get closer to, either. Black as crude oil slick, heavy as a lead weight, a black hole drawing you closer and closer to something that will twist you out of recognizability. There is some kind of horrible truth waiting for you, and you won’t be able to stave off the realization of it forever. That is the way with truths. Something has been not-right for as long as you can remember. Every memory is colored by it. Will look different once you understand what is tinting the lens black, obscuring the reality.

That is terrifying.

There is so much to lose. Because it wasn’t all bad, really, it wasn’t, it _wasn’t all bad_. It can’t have all been bad. You can’t lose the afternoons in the garden with Jane, the picnics, the blissful year you and Fala had before it all went to hell, the little burst of pride when you did something right, for once, something so right that mother couldn’t help but love you at least a little for it, for a moment. If the parts you don’t care to think about are rotted-through, if it’s not just you that’s half-blackened and eaten away by spores of mold, it’s the good parts, too. And you’ll never be able to go back to them again without the pain and fear and corrosion they’ve helped you ward off for so long.

“Don’t gotta be there yet,” he says.

Thank goodness. You’re sure you’ll fall apart, exposing the vast hollow pit inside of you, peel away to ribbons and float away on the wind when it happens. Increasingly, you are sure it is _going to happen_. How terrifying.

You put the terror in a box and squirm in his lap until you can kiss him, sort of, the line of his jaw. You break away before he can reciprocate.

“Thank you, Dirk,” you tell him, clutching the guitar as tight to your body as ever. “It’s a beautiful gift. Truly, it is.”

It almost balances the rest of it out. When you cling to it hard enough, strings cutting into your hands painfully, it does. It’s proof you have something. Proof that, for long enough for him to paint it, you had him. Even if he someday balks at the desolate shell you leave behind, without the load-bearing white lies that have sustained you for this long.

You have him, for another moment, and then another, and another. The silent seconds drag on, pendulously slow and heavy with a meaning you can’t quite grasp.

\---

The last night before departure, you return to Kanaya’s fitting studio while Dirk is out at a different tavern with Vriska and most of the crew. Roxy is puttering around as well, having waved off invitations to join with reassurances that she still has a few last things to put in order at _Starlight’s End_.

She mostly seems to be feeding the cats a few last scraps of to-be-discarded meat, watching the sky mellow from blue to black with her shamisen on the rear stoop. Nothing about her affect suggests any sort of downheartedness, and while you linger in the kitchen for longer than necessary, listening as she settles into a tune and hums along with herself intermittently, she doesn’t make conversation, and neither do you. With a friendly ‘good night!’ over your shoulder on your way out, you gently close the door.

It’s for the best that you have something of your own to do.

Kanaya’s office is generally tidier, now that it isn’t overflowing with various half-finished garments. Her books are mostly tucked away in shelves, only a stack of correspondence and an open box of sewing supplies on her desk.

You enter cautiously, not wanting to disturb her if she’s caught up in her work.

By the looks of it, she’s already prepared the velvet, laying out in three neat, uniformly-sewn pieces across her workspace. The rest of what you’ll wear has been packed conveniently into trunks, along with your novels and trinkets from home. This is truly the last thing to be done before you set off, and you swallow nervously as you step inside.

The clock over her desk almost precisely indicates the agreed-upon hour, and she looks up from whatever she’s been reading.

“Make yourself comfortable,” she suggests, indicating two threadbare but comfortable seats. Once, they might have been lined in velvet of their own. You sit, back straight, ankles crossed, perfectly comported. “I’ll be over in a second. You won’t have to stand for this.”

“Roger that!” you agree, smiling at the back of her head as she shuffles aside some papers and takes a moment to put her desk in order. There is a sort of in-between feeling to all of this; Roxy must have felt it too, and now you get the same impression from Kanaya. One of quiet contemplation in the calm before something important.

“Alright,” she finally says, balancing the velvet over her shoulder and stepping over to join you. “Describe these garments for me, if you would. They have significance, that much is not lost on me.”

“They’re pretty simple,” you explain. “From what I could tell, just two strips of velvet of the sort I gave you, more or less, sewn together neatly. About three centimeters wide, sitting flush with the skin. The, er, neck and ankles. The direct translation for immulatio is sort of like… kind of like the word for ‘tribute’. A symbol of my profession. What you’ve got looks plum perfect!”

She nods thoughtfully.

“Are they necessary for this?” she asks. “What purpose will they serve?”

“Verisimilitude,” you say. “We don’t very well know what he might know of me, and… well, if there’s anything the citizenry of Aetria is likely to remember of me enough to bring it up, it’s these… things. And their meaning. Not a _bad_ meaning. Litgamella \- that’s the word for it, it’s not quite the same as a prostitute, if I’m being honest, there’s a religious component and sort of a prescribed courtly role - I can’t actually say with any certainty that I know how we’re regarded by the sort of people who would have no reason to think they’d ever acquire our services. I’d imagine the whole thing is a bit of a harmless joke, you know, the decadence of the upper echelons. ‘You’re not likely to meet with our prince in a _traditional_ diplomatic setting’, they might say, and have a chuckle about it. It would be a means of defraying tension without… impugning the actual Empress or Empire itself. Showboating about our wealth, just a bit. It’s rather a mark of prosperity that such a position even exists, you know! That our society can sustain a whole passel of young people doing nothing of much import.”

“I believe you,” she says, her tone reassuring. “If you need them, you will have them. I would be remiss, however, not to notice that the topic seems to distress you.”

“I’m not distressed!” you insist, digging your nails into your palms to keep your tone somewhere approaching ‘even’.

She doesn’t say anything. This seems to be the most effective tool in her arsenal, the pure, searing discomfort of her unperturbed, expectant expression. Because you know she must be thinking _something_ , and it will be up to you to make sure it’s _the right thing_ , and to do that, you have to tell her stuff. Explain things.

“Perhaps a little distressed,” you amend, folding your hands up on your lap carefully, demurely. “Dirk has always made kind of a big deal of them. Which has - I mean, once he knew I wasn’t a slave, it _really_ felt like something he ought to be okay with, right? They are just ornaments that signify something important about my role. Liability and whatnot. I am somewhat… divested of accountability, I mean, in a legal sense. Not all litgamella wear them, even, they’re a mark of a certain stature, once one completes their devotional service and is no longer housed in the temple. I was the youngest _ever_ to graduate, you know. Four years younger than my mother was when she got hers. And she was the Empress, and she wore hers all the while, even long after she stopped taking patrons, so it would be the highest sort of ridiculousness to act like they prevent civic participation, or - or diminish the wearer in any way!”

“They have the look of bonds,” she notes, her tone suggesting that she is unconvinced. “I can hardly fault him for his concern.”

“Well, they’re not,” you say, very resolutely. “They’re an entirely different thing than the collars and whatnot that the caro supellecta wear, which are _themselves_ a mark of their patron household’s honor and respect for their service, and not _that_ much about ownership. It is just a totally different situation, even, than that, and anyone who knows anything about Aetria would know the difference at a glance.”

You’re not making a lot of sense to yourself, even, at this point, not sure what you’re trying to argue, which is always the killing blow to your capacity to debate something or other. With a long-suffering sigh, you slump in your seat, rubbing at your eyes with the heels of your hands.

“This is who I was,” you say, gesturing at the strips of velvet hanging from her shoulder. “All I was, for most of my life. They’re the reason that I can have these strategic talks with you, I sure as hell didn’t learn all this stuff over military history lessons with Janey back when I was... you said it yourself, that this would be a challenge, and I - I met a lot of similar challenges, and overcame all of them, and I was _good_ at it, and I haven’t felt good at anything in the same way since I took them off, and I _can’t_ mess this up, you understand? It would be just one more obstacle, not to have them, to be pretending at being myself-as-I-was so _anemically_ , just utterly naked. Once it’s all done, Dirk will cut them off again whenever he next gets a bee in his bonnet about how they look like such-and-such and then that will be the end of it all.”

Maybe it would be more compelling if your hands weren’t shaking so fervently. But the thing is, you don’t think any of that wasn’t _true_ , you’re just sincerely terrified that she’s going to put the kibosh on this, or else refuse to help you make them and leave you with either your own slapdash efforts or utterly bare, and the thought is unthinkable.

“Breathe,” she instructs you, and you comply readily, gulping air and trying to dial it back a bit, so focused on the task that you hardly notice her leaning over to put a hand on your shoulder.

Her touch is steady and sincerely reassuring, and you manage to stop with the panicking thing before you work yourself into a sobbing fit, sparing that portion of your dignity, leaning into the weight of her hand quite involuntarily. She doesn’t stop until you recollect yourself and sit up, swallowing a few more breaths before regaining your posture.

“Sorry,” you say quickly, and she shakes her head.

“You have nothing to apologize for. May I take your measurements, then?”

You nod wordlessly as she wraps a the mostly-finished garment around your neck, draws it taut, makes a mark with a little piece of chalk from her long, drapey sleeve.

“Very good,” she tells you, which, while unnecessary, is… nice. You nod silent thanks, sniffling only a little in the process, and she kneels to do the same, measuring out fabric just above the epiphysis of your tibia, where the bone goes solid and slender. You don’t know all the words for the muscles; you’ve never had much in the way of them before.

She works without comment, measuring and marking, taking no liberties and drawing back, leaving an arm’s space between you when she is done.

“I promised,” she says quietly, sitting back and looking up at you, her eyes dry but very sad, “that you would have whatever you needed for this endeavor to succeed.”

“I need this,” you reply, just as quiet. “It must seem… ridiculous, just utter flummery on my part -”

“You don’t need to explain any further. I understand.”

“ _How_?”

“A person can learn to love anything, when it is all they have,” she tells you.

Any thought of protest dies long before it shapes your lips, and you stare down at her, and she meets your gaze, unhesitating. There are too many gaps in your understanding of her to fill, too much unsaid between you to connect the disparate mental images of her that exist to you.

You stand from your seat, and offer her your hand, helping her to her feet without any sort of verbal rejoinder. She nods her thanks, setting the strips of velvet down beside her sewing machine.

“These will be readied shortly,” she says. “I will keep them in my possession, to be affixed immediately before we make landfall. It will be the work of a moment.”

“Thank you.”

“I ought to be thanking _you_ , Jake.”

You don’t try to argue.

“Get some rest,” she adds, seating herself, adjusting her oil lamp to burn brighter, the liquid gold light spilling over the piles of documents, discarded scraps of fabric, her face, shrouded in shadow. It’s grown dark while you’ve talked. “Tomorrow will come early. We’ll embark by late afternoon, and we must be ready.”

This time, when you bow, she doesn’t smile. The corner of her mouth twists downward, slightly. Her sewing machine begins to hum, her foot on the pedal, as you leave, closing the door quietly behind you.

 _Starlight’s End_ is empty, dark, and silent as you make your way back up the stairs, for your last night in your room. Dirk, of course, has not come back yet, and you leave the door unlocked so he’ll be able to come to bed whenever they get in from their carousing and shindiggery. After just a few days, you’ve started to trust these walls, as much as you can trust anything.

You wash up, brush your teeth, strip down to your underclothes, and slip under the covers, all in a peculiar dark fog, thinking-but-not-thinking, contemplating something you can’t bring yourself to grasp just yet, don’t quite have the necessary handhold on it. Something slippery and vast.

With the lamp out, the room cool, the covers warm, and the moonlight wan and silvery in the small window, you fall asleep quickly. Sleeping is easier than thinking; dreaming is not so much.

\---

It’s still chilly in the room, later at night, the moonlight gone from your window, your forehead damp with sweat and your hair mussed from twisting about under the covers. Your body wakes up before your mind, and you reach for someone who ought to be beside you, but isn’t, yet.

Dirk is locking the door quietly. You can make out the barest outline of his form, can hear him brushing his teeth, the slosh of water from the pitcher, can smell the jasmine soap and the minty-orangey paste he uses, when he can find it at market. 

You don’t entirely wake up from your dream. It was dark there, too, the weight of water and silence and fear replaced with the light duvet resting over your chest. You watch his outline move, and wait for him to disappear.

He doesn’t seem to realized you’re awake, sort of, undressing and rolling into bed, his hands seeking out the warmth of your body, finding your shoulder and your hip as he settles in, half on top of you, half beside you. He kisses you on the cheek, and that breaks your reverie just slightly. This close, beneath the soap, he smells like gunpowder and rum, though there is no telltale drunken languidness to his movements as he nestles up against your bare chest, slotting familiarly into your arms in the process of draping himself over you.

Slowly, your breathing steadies, and you disentwine your legs from the sheets, nestle in as close to him as you can get. He doesn’t stop you from seeking out his lips, and you kiss him, soft and gentle and curious. Dreams don’t feel good, but he always does. Always pulling you back from the worst of yourself.

Losing track of his mouth in the dark, you find his jaw, his neck, the curve of his throat. Without any real force, you prop him up, roll onto your shoulder, running your fingers through his hair, listening, _feeling_ as his breaths quicken and lose their evenness.

“Jake,” he starts to say, and his voice, low and emanating from a point beneath his solar plexus as much as his mouth, makes you shiver.

“Please,” you say, cutting him off, whatever he was going to say next, whatever words his sharp inhale would carry out of him. “I need you.”

His fingertips dig into the meat of your bicep, for the space of a second, then relax. He stills himself for you, stroking your cheek a last time before he lets his hand fall to his side, the tension easing from his shoulders, the weight of his head resting in the palm of your hand, still carded through his hair.

He doesn’t have to say it for you to hear the words; ‘only what you want’. He’s said it often enough before.

You lay him down carefully, sufficiently adjusted to the dark that you can make him out more clearly. His eyes are closed, his throat bared, his body unstirring, the rise and fall of his chest and the warmth of his body the only indications that he is even alive.

As you watch, his eyelashes flutter open, the gleam of scant streetlight off his iris scarcely visible in the near-perfect darkness. You brush them closed, each in turn, with a fingertip, and he complies with the wordless order, still and silent as he is when you wake up next to him in the mornings. You settle in over him, keeping your weight on your knees, not wanting to just mash your bodies together yet, but also… very much wanting exactly that. You trace the elegant curve of his cheek with the pad of your thumb, run a fingertip over his lips, nudging them open easily.

His heart races as you press a finger into his mouth, then another. His tongue is slack and yielding against your touch, though you can feel him fight a shudder as you stroke him, slicking up your fingertips. It’s teasing and unnecessary, and you linger at it as you withdraw. Half the pleasure is in the way his lips stay parted, the extent to which he is entirely yours, the heady sense that you could do anything to him, like this, and he would do his best to lay back and take it. Would enjoy it, just because it was what you wanted.

What you _want_ to do, though, is just to - well, you - you’re not sure. It’s hard to think for wanting _all of him_ so badly. He’s hard beneath your fingertips when you reach down and search him out, still wet and warm from his mouth. The musculature of his abdomen locks with the effort of holding still, which would require you to suspend your disbelief if you were pretending anything. There’s no deception to it, only acquiescence.

You kiss him, deep and gentle, as you manipulate his body, slowly working him up.

It’s for you, every part of what he’s doing. The stifled hitches to his breathing as you press your fingers into him, the aborted thrusts of his hips as you roll the pad of your thumb over the sensitive head of his dick, crooking your fingers shallowly until you feel him stiffen with the effort of not vocalizing his pleasure. You can feel how badly he wants to push back, take more.

At the same time, having done this very thing before, in what might as well have been this bed, you find it fascinating how different you are. How easily you can maneuver him about to your liking, how much stronger you’ve gotten. How he trusts you.

Although you don’t wholly rely on him checking his own strength, not anymore, he does anyway. You match the pressure of each languid stroke to his dick with a slow thrust of your fingers until he can’t entirely suppress the way his body trembles, the fervency of his gasps against your lips. Sliding out, you release your grip on him before he can quite make it to his peak, and you kiss him harder to stifle the noise of unrealized pleasure you know is coming.

When his breathing steadies slightly, you resume your attentions, and he breaks more easily this time, kissing you back before he thinks to stop himself, canting his hips to meet you as you thrust into him, tightening involuntarily around you each time his body spasms.

It’s not that you want to torture him. You want this to last forever. His needing you is _intoxicating_ , his closeness, the warmth and familiarity of touching him, how easy it is to do this without speaking. You _know_ him, the crisp black lines of his tattoos, the shape of his face, every bone, every muscle, every sound he can make.

You deny him again, pulling him back from the edge, his eyes still screwed shut, his lips parting wordlessly around silenced cries. He has no time to object, because you’re only releasing him to do away with your underclothes, establishing a steadying grip on his shoulder and a hand at his waist, and sinking into him until your hips are pressed together, the ring through the base of your shaft digging into you as it nudges up against his dick, a mild twinge of pain that grounds you in your body like a static jolt.

He exhales sharply, rolling his hips before he catches himself and goes motionless beneath you, his breathing deliberately even, though the ragged quality to it doesn’t abate. You move against him in shallow, rocking thrusts. Trying to drag it out, the pleasure of being inside of him. He tightens involuntarily around you, wet enough to take it easily when you press past the slight resistance.

It’s difficult to put words to it, what makes this so much easier. Dark as it is, you can see his lips part rapturously each time you enter him, you can feel his body reacting, the tug of metal against flesh, his and yours both. He’s achingly hard against you, shuddering at the precipice of climax, and pressure builds in the pit of your stomach with every thrust, and you don’t… usually think about it much, how you feel.

There are pitfalls in your consciousness, concealed by innocent coverings of dry leaves and twigs, with poisonous stakes waiting at the bottom. And these wet, pleasurable trains of thought are the only ones that can take you there, to memories of utterly inexplicable fear and helplessness and betrayal, of your body, by your body.

So you don’t usually hop on at all. You can do it without your mind completely present, and it’s safer that way, still fine, still feels the same without thinking about what’s happening to _you_. You have made a habit of putting your awareness somewhere else, somewhere safe, in another person. Of course, it shuts out everything else, too, the good as well as the might-be-bad.

Not quite like this, though, with the two of you locked together like puzzle-pieces in the dark, your hands digging into him and _no one’s_ on you. He’s yours to touch and use and _know_. It still feels too _dark_ to be love, too hot and desperate and atrociously messy. But in the absence of light, you can’t discern the color. And in the absence of words, you can be sure he isn’t lying, and neither are you. 

When you kiss him again, it’s asynchronously sweet. Your grip on his hipbone, thumb digging into the wing of his ilium, has relaxed and drifted down the inside of his thigh, where it catches again. As you gently trace tonguetips with him, move your lips lightly over his, you’re also forcing his damned leg out of the way, hiking his knee up to his chest, and driving deeper into him without any further warning.

He swears, or tries to, as you fuck him in earnest, feeling it in your hand on his shoulder, the twist of the gold ring above your dick as it slides over him, the building tension in your gut, dispelled like static down your extremities, only barely reined in by the fact that you’re focusing on it so acutely. You _never_ focus on it, if you can help it. 

You roll your hips with each thrust, your pelvis as flush with his as you can make it. There’s a trick to it, to burying yourself in someone else. An entirely different set of challenges to holding onto yourself in the process. 

All there even _is_ to hold is him.

That’s not entirely true. It’s _your_ nerve endings searing every time you drive into him, your forearms locked and the pads of your fingers pressing into his skin, the flex of your abdominal muscles that keeps the delicious friction building between you, pulls stifled noises and choking half-breaths from his lips, still soft on yours.

A violent frisson of arousal passes through him, the musculature of his thigh going taut, his shoulders rigid as steel. A helpless moan tears its way out of his chest, and he makes no effort to stifle it. You kiss him harder, lean your weight in more adamantly to keep him where you want him, spread open against the spasming tightness of his body.

He clenches down on your dick. The sudden change in sensation, the drag of him around you as you pump in and out of him a final time, all of it has you spilling into him all at once, a screwed-tight weight inside of you dispelled.

It’s one hell of an orgasm after several days of complete self-denial. You kiss him very gently as the aftershocks fade, opening his mouth with your tongue. Easy, since all the fight has gone out of him. The set of his shoulders is loose and yielding, his limbs heavy as you stroke his thigh and reposition him, sliding yourself free and laying him out, supine, the way he sleeps.

The unusually heavy rise and fall of his chest, ragged as he catches up with himself, once again give him away. He makes no effort to hide anything, though, offers no resistance as you perfunctorily dry yourself on the hem of the sheets and dip down between his legs. He’s still hard, though you can tell by the way he feels against your lips as much as by his shudder in response that, while you could probably work a few more out of him, if you wanted to, it would be a painful kind of pleasure. He likes that sort of thing, you know, but you’re not in a frame of mind where you could get any enjoyment of your own out of hurting him, even if he begged you for it.

He doesn’t beg for anything. He’s silent, still against the pillow as you delve into him and tongue him clean before you dry him with another handful of sheets. You won’t be sleeping in this bed again; you can ignore the pang of displeasure about the untidiness of it all, in favor of setting him to rights and getting snuggled in next to him.

His arms are strong and steady, pulling you up to join him once you’re done. You could almost forget it happened at all, except for the ache of your overtaxed muscles and the taste of yourself and him in your mouth.

It’s chilly enough that neither of you is too sweat-drenched for this to be pleasant, being tangled under the covers and tangled up with him. He kisses your temple, mussing your hair, and you think you can feel a slight smile on his lips. It’s all thoroughly languid and unhurried. You could almost drift back to sleep, though you’re as electrified as you are exhausted.

That was certainly _something_.

“So,” he says quietly. “Talk it out now, or later?”

You sigh your objection to any kind of anything that is not cuddling, but you could’ve seen this coming from a mile away.

“What’s to talk about?” you reply, a little hoarse, knowing full well what he means.

He takes a moment to sort carefully through the words, and you grope about on the side table to find your glasses. You want to be sure of what faces he is making, don’t want to say anything wrong. It’s a delicate moment, the liminal space before sailing off. All the uncertainties surrounding the voyage. The uncertainties about yourself.

Here is what you expect. A softball opener, ‘how are you feeling?’ Easy answer. ‘Good, very good.’ Let yourself ramble a little bit, tip your hand enough that he recognizes that there was something different and positive about this time and follows up on it. Dirk is perceptive enough to catch on to your cues, you’ve tested his acuity in that regard and never found it wanting. Sometimes too perceptive, though there’s nothing in particular you want to hide. Nothing he doesn’t already know. So you’ll divulge a little more, in a push-pull dance, until he knows where you stand.

You’ve already mapped out the rest of the exchange for him by the time he speaks.

“Why now? It’s been a few days, we’ve been… not. What changed?”

Ah, yes, that would be the problem with thinking eighteen conversational beats in advance. You’re caught off-guard when he goes off the script he never actually had. You sigh.

He deserves a real answer, but you don’t have one. The feelings don’t fit neatly in the partitions of words, yet, need corralling and considering and contemplating before you’ll come to some kind of conclusion. It’s not something you can whip up at a moment’s notice, especially while you can parse out sincere curiosity and worry etched in his expression. Damn your glasses-augmented ability to _see_.

“Give me a second,” you say, stalling.

“Anything you need,” he replies, settling back onto the pillow, holding you no less tight for it.

“I…” you start again. “I might have been having a bad dream. Which is not abnormal, especially when I’m all wound up, as I have been, about this… business. Not even in a bad, way, just challenged, a bit, by some of the things going on? Which is good, being challenged, better than being bored, I mean, just...”

That is probably the most sanitized way to put it. You know, the more you circumspectly approach the truth, that the whole _thing_ with Kanaya threw you off balance. How to explain that? She reminds you of something you’ve always wanted, but now that you have it, all the good and comfort you believed it would confer is suspect and confusing. Because, what, you don’t deserve it? She keeps talking like you deserve it, which is, itself, quite disorienting. She keeps saying things she shouldn’t. That someone in her position just _shouldn’t_. Doing things that don’t make any sense.

True to his word, he waits for you to figure it out.

“I had a last fitting with Kanaya,” you say. “The finality, I think, struck me a little bit. And, uh, the fact that she - I don’t _know_ , Dirk, isn’t it horrible to get the things you want sometimes? To realize things didn’t actually have to be the way they were, maybe? It’s just that I didn’t think it could be like that. It was easier when it was a hare-brained flight of fancy.”

None of this has any hope of making sense to anyone but you, who has to live with all the swirling thoughts in your head. You can’t just say it, can’t even think it. 

It’s the worst kind of double-dealing faithlessness, when it comes down to it. That was all you could ever offer her, all mother ever ultimately asked of you, that you be loyal to her. And you keep veering so close to the cliff’s edge of… not. Of saying something aloud that you won’t be able to take back, once he knows it too.

Underneath all that, even, there’s the question of… well, then, what _is_ Kanaya to you, if she doesn’t fit in the recently vacated, suspiciously coffin-like box you had subconsciously relegated for her? What is she, at all? Is any of this _allowed_ , being touched and liking it by someone who isn’t your One True Love and isn’t exactly your friend, either? Because she isn’t your friend, you _have_ friends and it doesn’t feel like that at all.

You take a deep breath and prepare to try again.

“I promise I’m not being intentionally dense as some kind of lead-gold alloy, in here. I don’t suppose I have the words. I felt bad. That’s the long and short of it. I’ve felt kind of weird for the last few days, without knowing why, and I still don’t totally get where that’s coming from, the _badness_. Maybe it’s the same as what’s always been happening in here.”

Pausing to indicate your own chest, you lose your momentum and just lay back, partially on top of him. He’s not actively touching you. The only points of contact are where your bodies happen to connect on the small bed. You do recognize the urgency of getting this sorted out, lest you face a week and a half of agony in some hammock on the Ascension, stewing in your own misery.

Misery? Not really.

Just discomfort. Guilt, sure. A nameless, formless confusion that permeates things that ought to be good, ought to be enjoyable, like a cloying black fog.

He waits for you to continue. Not in the almost prompting way Kanaya does. If it weren’t for the flutter of his eyelashes in the dark, the shine to his eyes, you’d wonder if he’d actually fallen asleep.

When you don’t pick back up, though, he shifts to give himself more space and moves on.

“Did it help?”

You laugh, short and harsh. “Is it bad if it did?”

“Nah. Not even a little. We’ve talked about it, you know I’m all kinds of down for anything you’re into. I mean, d’you want to get into this specific kink shit, what it might help work out?”

“I don’t usually think about it. I don’t - it’s not as though I _mind_ talking about it, especially if it’s you talking. Ugh. I don’t think I’m making much sense,” you sigh, nestling into the crook of his arm.

Besides, you’ve talked about it before. Maybe not _quite_ like this, on your end of things. It was while you were still figuring out the parameters of this new life for yourself, on the ship. That was different. It’s a tad embarrassing to concede to yourself that you were not much thinking of him as your teammate, then. Your friend, sure. But someone you very much had to impress, one audition, _vital_ to nail, because there were no alternatives. Just him.

“I like being useful for the people I love. It’s kinda my whole deal, you might’ve noticed.”

“Perhaps a little,” you sigh, knowing the way he works his fingers to the bone on the ship, given the opportunity. Not especially liking the comparison, but oh well.

“S’a little different with you. I know there’s baggage, makes it more complicated. Hell, that’s oversimplifying the shit out of the whole thing already, but like. I’ve already made the choice, dude. I’m yours as long as you’ll have me. And let me be completely clear, one hundred percent of the actual logistics of rawing the shit out of me while I pretend to be asleep? Hot as fuck.”

“Must you put it quite so explicitly?” you groan, grateful for the darkness concealing the rush of blood to your cheeks.

“Yes. Next question,” he fires back, pressing a conciliatory kiss to your temple. “Uh, or actually, if it can be my turn, I want to follow up on the ‘did it help’ front, since you sidestepped that pretty neatly. Can we get a sex postmortem from your side of the bed?”

He never makes things easy, does he. You exhale all in a huff.

“Fine,” you say, having mostly forgotten what you were _planning_ to reply when he asked how you were. You try to fish about for the words, don’t find them as quickly as you would like, and move right on. “I clearly enjoyed it, didn’t I?”

“Not makin’ any assumptions over here.”

“I just mean to say that - I don’t know. I _did_ like it. An awful lot. Different than usual. I mean, not that I don’t always. It’s just. I think I’m to a place where…” You gesture lamely about, trying to sum it up, somehow. “I trust you. To like it. Because you like me.”

It doesn’t sound like much, when you say it that way. ‘Like’ is such a small word for any of what you feel, or what he might feel. You _like_ the crisp bite of a stalk of fresh celery. But you can’t quite fit any of the other words around the concept.

You don’t _doubt_ love so much as you increasingly disbelieve in its existence altogether as any one unified thing. What Roxy calls love and what Dirk calls love and what everyone else is going around calling love, it’s all a different miasma of feelings and attachments and affections, and not one that you can easily dissemble like a cadaver and understand.

‘Like’ is a simple value judgement that you trust him to consistently make. And that’s final. And offering that true statement to him is the best you can do, though he deserves much more, after everything.

You’re ready to try to explain, but he doesn’t ask you to. Instead, he kisses you again.

“Good,” he says, lifting your glasses off the bridge of your nose, leaning over you to put them back on the nightstand, and running his thumb over the low arch of your zygomatic process. “I trust you. Not to use me to hurt yourself, I mean. That’s my big-deal conclusion of the night.”

“Mighty quick on that one,” you sigh, leaning into his touch despite yourself. “But Dirk- I promise, for real, it’s not my intention. I love you. I don’t want to hurt you.”

And that _would_ hurt him. The easiest route to hurting him, for the moment, is through you. He’s made himself very vulnerable, and doesn’t seem to entirely realize it.

“Couldn’t if you tried. I’m durable.”

“Let’s not make a challenge out of that, dear heart,” you say gently.

“Suit yourself. It’d be a fun challenge. Oiled up like a couple of greased pigs. Probably mud involved? Just fuckin’ wallowing in unchecked masculine fervor. Sweat -”

“You make it sound so appealing,” you laugh, and snuggle back up to both him and the pillow. “I’m going to miss falling asleep to your sweet nothings.”

“- _dripping_ down, hey, c’mon, I’m painting a word picture.”

“That’s regrettably very true. I love you. Please hang up your word paintbrush and go to sleep.”

“I’ll still talk to you on the ship. I’ll sing. It’ll be better this time.”

His promises have taken on a drowsy cadence. His sentences stretch longer and veer away from their intentions, into spiraling digressions, when he is tired or distracted. You are gambling on ‘tired’. While you snagged a few hours before he made it home, he hasn’t had the same opportunity.

“I know,” you tell him, brushing his hair back from his face, tracing the boundary of his hairline, admiring what you can make out of him in the dark. “I’ll be better, too.”

“I’m still taking it slow,” he adds, half directing the comment into his pillow. “On my end, I mean. That sound fair to you? I don’t… want to push it.”

The funny thing is, you know him well enough to know that he’s heartened by this conversation. He’d be asking more questions if he wasn’t. Tired or not, he is relentless when he feels there may be a stone left unturned. He _does_ want to push it, almost certainly. If Dirk _were_ a King, he would be the King of pushing things. You say that without malice, but with an acute awareness that he is probably trying to talk himself out of letting this go too much further.

Which means there _is_ further you could go. At least on his end.

You promised you’d be careful, and you don’t mean to break that promise yourself. But it’s impossible to unlearn an option. At least you’ll have a week and a half to think it over in a shitty little hammock.

For now, you hum your gratitude, meaning it more than you would have if you thought it was only a platitude, his not-pushing-it. You roll over, snuggling up all cozy-like, the little spoon this time. His hand finds the curve of your ass, like he’s reminding himself that it exists, before settling on your hip. You wriggle closer, snorting out a soft burst of laughter.

He’s already half-asleep, in earnest, this go-around.

You listen to him breathe for a long time before you join him in unconsciousness.

\---

The crew of the Diamond is assembled on the dock to see you all off, though by now they’ve mostly said their goodbyes and peeled off or else been commissioned by Vriska and Roxy to assist with the raising and tying down of the Ascension’s massive junk sail. John supervises cheerfully, hovering around like a blue be-scarfed moth, suggesting adjustments to the positioning of the battens and generally trying to help.

You and Dirk sit at the end of the dock, watching the spectacle. The night feels far away after a clear, cold morning, the sunlight harsh even as the sunset slowly turns it to from searing white to liquid gold. Mostly ignoring the other on-deck proceedings, Kanaya is sitting alone a little further down, her fingertips trailing in the perfectly still, glassy waters of the harbor.

For a moment, you shift to watch her instead - Equius, at Vriska’s urging, has swung the sail around and nearly knocked Roxy overboard, though John fluttered down to catch her in a rather debonair bridal carry, his laughter ringing out over the calm surface of the sea. It’s all very well and good, but that kind of elaborate slapstick is fairly old hat at this point.

Kanaya’s lips move quickly, making almost no sound at all. You can’t quite make out what she’s saying, but you squint a little, wondering all the same.

Dirk notices the redirection of your attention and elbows you gently in the ribs.

“Feels kinda weird to watch,” he notes, nodding in her general direction as you chuckle awkwardly. “Private conversation.”

“Yes, well, no one ever gives _us_ any privacy,” you retort, a little petulantly, then sigh. “Do you think she’s lonely? I don’t know what I’d do if I just had to go about my business, in love but unable to regularly… you know, it took hardly a day without you to get all antsy.”

“Not my place to weigh in,” he says with a shrug. “ _Theoretically_ , at least, _some_ people deal just fine with a lot of time to themselves. Fuck if I know what that’s like. And I’d think it’d be easier to count on a God still being there once you finished whatever was keeping you away.”

“Strictly theoretically,” you agree. “Can’t relate.”

“Yeah.”

Kanaya cups a handful of water, whispering something to it, a smile flitting across what little of her face you can see. Your distance vision is actually quite good; it’s the reading and the up-close-ing that you badly need your glasses to accomplish. There’s a ruddy flush to the high points of her face. This is starting to feel a wee bit voyeuristic on your part. If it were anyone else, it would be a kind of funny scene, but it is her, so you put your head on Dirk’s shoulder and turn your attention to the horizon.

“We should probably help,” you sigh.

“It’s a small ship. They’ve got this one. We’d just be in the way,” he says. There’s some longing in his voice. He _hates_ sitting around when there’s work to be done, even in the abstract. This is almost certainly a brutal form of torture for him, to watch others do what he could do better, more quickly, with fewer pratfalls.

You savor the time with him, how the rickety dock shifts slightly in the currents but doesn’t rock. Leaving the Diamond, you thought you’d miss the comforting embrace of the waves. Now, you’re sure you’ll miss the land. Everything is about wanting something other than what you have, except for his shoulder against yours and the warmth of his attention. Which is about wanting more of it, more more more until you swell up like a tick and explode, probably.

The sun dips lower, partially concealed by the large junk sail. The Ascension is a single-masted catboat of about forty feet in length, plus some change. There isn’t much to see on the deck but a wheel, and the inside cabin is so choked with treasure and the necessary provisions that the crew was hard-pressed to string three hammocks inside. It smells like fresh paint, tar, and salt. You’ve paced the deck, poked at everything there is to be poked at, offered to help and been gently shot down, all that fun stuff.

You wonder when the Sea King will be showing up, or if that’s a thing that is going to happen at all. John does seem semi-intent on sticking around, mostly to bother Vriska, who is rather getting in the way of the on-deck proceedings herself, trading insults and crude gestures with a literal, actual god wrapped up in tatterdemalion silks.

Dirk watches with a wistful smile, and you let your eyes wander until you are distracted by a loud snort, like someone clearing their throat of a chicken bone, and startle beside him.

It’s an enormous grey-brown creature floating serenely in the murky water, only its relatively small head breaking the surface. At least twelve feet in length, dear Gods, what the fuck? Whiskery, mammalian, but not a whale. It swims languidly, watching you with large, liquid-black eyes, seemingly unbothered by the ruckus being kicked up on the small ship.

“Dirk,” you hiss, nudging him with your shoulder and indicating the creature.

“Huh? Oh, fuck, dude, have you seen the sea lions yet? They’re rad as hell. Don’t worry, long as you don’t have food on you and you haven’t hauled one into your boat, they mostly don’t give a shit about people.”

Neither of those conditions apply. You watch, spellbound, as the enormous, corpulent beast dives down, becoming a greyish light-shadow in the depths before spinning back up with the grace of a dancer, an unhappy-looking fish in its maw. Tossing its head back, it chomps the poor thing a few times before swallowing it down. You don’t recognize the fish; it’s not the kind of deep sea fare you even _might_ have caught out on the open ocean, and it disappears quickly. The sea lion bobs at the surface, placid as anything, like a sea-lion-shaped piece of cork floating serenely in the calm waters of the bay.

“What’d I tell you. Rad as hell,” he says.

“You didn’t oversell the radness,” you agree. “What a nice place this is.”

“Once you get used to the smell.”

You smile. It’s been a while since you noticed. He smells like fresh cotton and soap and jasmine, all gussied up for the big pushing-off moment.

From the ship, a shout of victory goes up; you don’t know enough to tell what is going on, but you think the sail is ready. The Ascension is all good to go. Just needs the rest of her crew, now. Kanaya stands to her full height, shakes her hands dry, and turns to catch your eye.

You shoot her a reassuring set of finger-guns, and she smiles dolefully. Perhaps you were rather quiet over brunch, but you’re back in gear now. Better than back in gear. You want nothing more than to sit at the prow of the small boat, the wind at your back, the current pushing you forward, adventure on the horizon! You are so ready to screw this asshole over. Lord Dualscar is going to wish he _actually_ died fifty years ago. You are going to take this moment by moment, and what lovely moments they have been so far! Some of them.

Enough. Enough fresh good to make it eminently survivable.

Equius, Nepeta, and Karkat respectively step, leap, and tumble, swearing all the way, down to the dock. The ship is weighed down, riding low in the still water, and not especially tall to begin with. Not that sort of craft, you suppose. Kanaya climbs easily onboard, making her way to the wheel without delay. Roxy and Aradia chat at the door to the below-deck space, John and Vriska sit, somewhat improbably, on top of the junk sail, and it’s just you and Dirk left to hop on and… go.

Finally.

You get on the ship, with his help. He lifts you elegantly by the waist, then vaults the distance himself, grinning ear to ear. It’s on the two of you to hoist anchor, and you do, heaving it up and piling the chain into a neat little stack behind you, not especially hard work, especially with him doing most.

John flutters down, perching beside Roxy, leaving Vriska on the top batten of the sail, to shout obscenities down at him as he waves cheerfully and mimes not being able to hear her.

“Ready?” he asks, performing a variety of acrobatic poses midair that don’t seem to do anything as a warmup of sorts.

“Ready,” Kanaya confirms.

Wind fills each sheet of the junk sail, distorting the cream-colored fabric until it bows and curves like an accordion. You begin to move almost immediately; despite the weight of the cargo, it’s still a light, zippy boat, the sail expertly tailored. You wonder if Kanaya made it herself. Of course she did.

Your palms are already orange-y with rust, which puts a bit of a damper on things, though Dirk smiles at your inspection of the damage and offers you his shirt to clean them up. Very chivalrous. You tell him so.

The relief of an easy departure is infectious. The crewmates left behind on the dock wave, Nepeta on Equius’s shoulders for a better view, Karkat’s voice the only one audible as you slip away, cutting through the calm waters easily. The sail slips below the arch to the Court, and from there, it’s just a matter of watching it disappear.

John floats back up to retrieve Vriska. Free of the wall surrounding the Court, no longer blocked by the sail itself, you can see the sunset again, and it’s a lovely one. Chilly as it is, especially with the wind high and directly on the lot of you, your coat sits in the hold. You’ll take Dirk’s arms over that can of worms any day.

And you do. You sit with him beneath the sail, and say nothing as the sea rocks the ship gently.

You _do_ want to get to the good part.

But this part is pretty good, too.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> A slightly longer wait than planned, but: songs now have Songs Attached. Also, if you're on desktop, in case you didn't know, you can hover over the Aetrian with your mouse and see the translation.


	12. Sailing the Diamond Line (or, let's get mythical)

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Chapter-specific warning for seasickness (discussion of vomiting, Jake-tier euphemistic description of vomiting) and related reference to eating disorders. To skip all such direct mentions, ctrl+f to 'she does not thank you'.

Even an experienced sailor often requires a period of adjustment to the motion of a new ship. Jade reassured you of this at length, while you spoke with her at the beginning of your voyage on the on the _Black Diamond II_ \- while it wasn’t a huge change in terms of size, every craft moves differently. For once, you actually paid attention to her explanation of the phenomena at work, the effects of constant motions on the nervous system, mostly tied to the vagus nerve, which also has implications in digestion, hunger, sleep, mood, and a whole bunch of other functions.

In your experience, it looks rather like a hefty strand of spindled-off spaghetti. You’ve gotten curious about the rest of the body before, especially the bits and bobs responsible for the production and interpretation of sensation and potentially useful effects, while you were theoretically just mucking around with the skulls. It would be a touch charitable to call your probing about ‘science’, but you considered it a valiant sacrifice to the spirit of inquiry on the behalf of the nameless nobodies whose funerary rites you got to oversee.

All in all, you don’t sicken easily, and while you didn’t struggle one bit on the _Black Diamond II_ , even in the first few hours, Nepeta and Karkat, in contrast, had to chew ginger root for nearly a week and didn’t take more than a light lunch in that time, much to Roxy’s gentle mockery.

Seasickness is nothing to be ashamed of, really. Dirk’s drowsiness, Vriska being more headachey and thus slightly snippier than usual, something of a feat, all of it was almost certainly contributed-to by the asynchronous sloshing-about of organs and nerves and fleshy articles. Within a few days, all was more or less returned to normal.

Your strong stomach, which once mainly helped with the more _aged_ corpses, also comes to your aid as the comparatively small, low-situated catboat is jostled rhythmically by a tidy groundswell. You don’t suffer for a second as the _Ascension_ reaches open water. Kanaya makes no gesture of distress, and Aradia merely wrinkles her nose and retreats belowdeck to take a nap.

Everyone else is laid utterly low.

“Please do _endeavor_ to aim downwind,” Kanaya calls briskly from the aft, her instructions muffled slightly by the wind in question.

Outside of the harbor, the sea adopts an illusory color-change, from still and clear and green-black to opaque slate grey. There’s no white at the crest of the low wave-action that is the architect of the misery before you; while relatively choppy, the height can’t be over a foot at most. It must be more the roll of this particular vessel that has everyone all thrown for a loop.

The prow is hardly the best place for limiting motion, but it _is_ downwind, and as such, that is where Roxy has chosen to lose her lunch. Very noble of her, you think, and almost certainly a sign that she is well on her way to feeling better, since at some point, there is just no more throwing up left to be done. Dirk and Vriska are struggling more, since they are, between them, the two most rock-ribbed and intractable people alive when it comes to admitting to any sort of weakness.

Especially ocean-induced weakness. _Especially_ -especially the kind that doesn’t seem to bother anyone else all that much.

And neither of them is willing to just yak and get it over with.

The shape of the single-masted catboat is very different from every ship you’ve ever travelled on, or even seen, which you’re sure is the origin of the problem. About forty feet in length, maybe a third of the size of the Diamond or her successor, and with a topdeck barely three or four feet above the roiling sea, situated above the hold, the mast sprouting up more or less from its center. The _Ascension_ steers from the aft, a slightly lower deck below range of the junk sail, from which Kanaya is currently handling the wheel.

Currently, Dirk is propped up against the low wooden rail that lines the sort-of-upper deck, shoulders rising and falling irregularly and head lolling slightly to the side, revealing a determined grimace. You’ve been avoiding what seems like an inevitable argument for as long as you can manage, fetching fresh water and cups and a handful of rags for palliative efforts, so that Roxy will have something to rinse out her mouth.

When you can no longer avoid doing so in good conscience - it just feels wrong, seeing him not at his best, you’re sure it would devastate you to be in his position - you settle in beside him.

He very maturely conceals his face behind his forearm and pretends not to notice you struggling over the right words.

“I don’t like to see you like this,” you announce, hesitating.

“Makes two of us,” he mutters.

“Of - of course, I just. Look, bro, the only way out of this kind of discomfort is putting your head down and pushing through it. _Please_ let me try to help you out?”

“Counterproposal. Go away and let me die here.”

“Dear heart, you know I’m not going to do that,” you tell him, very gently, forcing down the inside-voice that insists he just gave you an excellent _out_ , and you could totally just hop below deck and this isn’t your problem at all. The fervency of said voice is magnified by the tension in his tone and the curtness of his remarks, whether or not this has anything to do with his no doubt incredibly uncomfortable position. You very badly don’t want him to be _mad_ at you.

You are telling yourself this, it happens, a lot more than you are telling _him_. But tell it you have, the words are out and there is no walking back on them!

“There’s - er, something I could do, though you might find it objectionable,” you continue. “If you’d budge over just a tad, let me get my hands on your stomach and your neck, we could get this over with quick as the proverbial bat out of hell. What do you say to that?”

He’s still awkwardly half-sprawled, tight-knit as a wind up toy before the spring snaps from sheer tension, but he looks up and you make the most reassuring face you can muster, trying to tamp down the worry and go with a friendly smile-ish thing.

“Fuck me up, Doctor English,” he announces, and hefts himself up into a sort of sitting position, leaning over the railing as much as is healthy on the slightly choppy sea.

You didn’t expect it to be that easy, but now comes the part that you imagine will be physically rather than emotionally uncomfortable. Lining up behind him, you search out familiar grips, first three fingers digging in just beneath the xiphoid process of his sternum, other hand positioning his throat, exerting slow pressure against the cartilage of his trachea.

“Relax,” you direct him. “From the hips up, muscle by muscle if you must.”

While you learned on yourself, you hope it will translate from body to body. You’ve got your own physiological idiosyncrasies, a few odd little tweaks to your nervous and endocrine systems from early ingestion of certain poultices and potions or whatever that are usually reserved for trainees past their coming of age. For the most part, it’s nothing to complain about.

He does his level best to follow your instructions, and you help him along, holding him securely, ensuring that you keep him balanced until his body has gone mostly slack.

Measuring a hand’s length below his xiphoid, you apply gentle pressure, pushing your fingertips shallowly in at a bit of an upward angle in slow, regular pulses.

“Fuck,” he mutters. “How d’you know how to -”

His state effectively cuts him off.

“I’ve worked with poison. I know there are poisoners walking around, since, heh, if I can work it out, anyone can. It’s just good sense to take precautions!” you explain, which is at least half of the entire truth.

Alcohol is its own kind of poison, and you have to be careful with that, too. You can’t drop your ability to self modulate for one fraction of a fraction of a second, but at the same time, certain patrons are much easier to deal with when they drink. So you mitigate in any way you can, and it hasn’t caught up with your teeth or damaged your tongue piercings, yet, so it doesn’t matter.

It would just be the highest kind of stupidity for someone to deliberately poison _you_. Mother would have torn the city apart in retaliation, and she’d have had plenty of support in the matter, too. You made sure to be valuable enough to justify it, just in case, people caring and all if you went and kicked it!

There have been moments where you really wondered whether anyone would care, but you’re really good at cultivating attachments. In others, at least. Wouldn’t it be easier if you could step outside yourself and have the shitty parts coach the good parts into placid enjoyment of their lot and then just - just… evaporate.

Dirk’s stomach clenches, and you refocus your attention posthaste as he finally muscles his way through the ol’ technicolor yawn and slumps, panting, against the body of the ship. His forehead is damp with sweat, his bangs plastered to it, and he looks utterly miserable and about as disheveled as you’ve ever seen him. Poor fellow, this can’t be pleasant.

“Sh,” you direct him, backing up to wet your scrap of cloth in the fresh water, brushing his hair aside and cooling his forehead, moving down to clean up his mouth, and coaching him through a few sips. “You are very tough. How do you feel?”

“Less… sloshy,” he sighs, closing his eyes as you set the cup aside.

“About all one can ask for. The rest won’t last forever, either. Even in really shitty weather, experienced sailors are never sick for longer than twelve hours or so.”

A flagrant lie, but a justifiable one. A great deal of it is psychological. Someone who insists they don’t get seasick often won’t; someone who insists they have a tendency towards it will find themselves suffering more acutely than they thought possible. That is just rudimentary stuff, and you have seen it bear out in practice on ferries and on horses and even on the _Diamond_. Either way, given his general state of being-fine-ness on other vessels, you have great confidence in his ability to be fine with all this. It will just take adjustment.

“S’been forever since I’ve been on a boat this _small_ ,” he mumbles, distraught, as you brush your fingers through his hair, straightening it out with an affectionate, ruffly gesture.

“Of course,” you agree, giving him a kiss on the cheek that he belatedly tries to dodge with a groan.

“’m disgusting,” he objects.

“Not unless I did a very poor job cleaning you up.”

“I literally just -”

“Dear heart, I’ve spent most of my free time in the last few years dealing with unclaimed corpses in varying states of putrefaction, won’t you let me have my victory lap?”

He sighs, looking queasy at the thought of any further discussion of decay.

“Have at it.”

You kiss him again, just a light one on the tip of his nose, ruffle his hair, then nip down the hatch to find him a fresh shirt. He’s sitting up, eyes closed and breathing steadily by the time you return, and looks markedly less bedraggled as you swap out his clothing. It’s really not too gross, you’ll just have to do a good scrub in seawater and then rinse it in your reserve of fresh to make it fully wearable again.

Out of the corner of your eye, however, it is obvious that Vriska is still in a state of abject misery.

Looking back up at him, you proceed to have a thirty-second ‘eye discussion’, in which he glances meaningfully at her and raises a curious eyebrow, you make your best ‘must I, really?’ face, both of his eyebrows go up in an intimation of a shrug, and you, long-suffering humanitarian that you are, sigh in defeat. You are no match for his compelling and articulate rhetoric.

Roxy has been doing her best to mitigate the Vriska Damage, though she would really be better off below deck, having a rest, if she doesn’t think she’s going to do anymore losing of her lunch. You tell her so, and she eagerly vanishes down into the hold, where at least there will be less movement of the boat to trouble her further.

This leaves you kneeling beside Vriska on the deck. She crouches in a bedraggled heap, knees tucked up to her chest, one hand steadying herself against the mast, the other, hook long since cast off, bolstering her legs.

“Hey now,” you begin, wincing when you realize you don’t usually _refer_ to her, or else you’ve completely forgotten how you do so, and would it be weird to call her Vriska to her face? “I can help you push through the worst of this, if you’ll let me do some adjustments of your - er, if you’d let me…”

“Give it a rest, English!” she snaps, muffled by her knees, pressed up to her chin. “I don’t _get_ seasick. I’m _fine_. Great, actually! I like it here! I’m having a good time.”

Even with her face half concealed by the whole fetal position thing going on, it’s clear that the effort of reassuring you that she is both fine and great has caused her substantial distress, and her low groan of indignation at her straits is only slightly concealed by the sounds of wind and waves.

Ignoring her agony politely, you shoot Dirk a helpless grimace. He shrugs, looks queasy at the movement, and averts his eyes. Poor thing.

Alright, fuck it.

“No one said anything about seasickness,” you say brusquely. “Let’s call it food poisoning, since surely that’s what’s happening, and get this all over with.”

“I’m way too badass for -” she starts to say, only to be interrupted by a wracking convulsion, and you can _see_ the sudden twitches of muscle in her jaw and neck, tremors through her body with the effort of not playing the whale right there on the deck.

“Yes, definitely,” you agree, ushering her over to the side.

She is a uniquely perplexing person in a number of ways, not least because she is so small and, as you gently lift her into a workable position, you find that her proportions are quite unexpected, too. Her bones feel too light. Well, you’ve heard enough about her childhood to fill an afternoon, so that’s no surprise, but feeling it is different than passively knowing it.

“Cop a feel,” she growls, “and I’ll gut you in your sleep, English, don’t fucking perv out on me!”

That is sort of the opposite of what you were doing, but you just sort of sigh and let it go.

“This won’t be easy,” you warn her, searching out her sternum and her throat in the semi-dark, “since it’s very counterintuitive, but the more you can relax, the easier this will happen.”

A challenge seems to be the right way to do it.

“Too good to shove your fingers down your throat, huh?” she argues hoarsely. “Fuck you. I’m totally relaxed. I’m a zen master.”

“Acid burns,” you chide her. “And you certainly are. Hold on, now.”

It kind of seems like there ought to be something here, doesn’t it? Between the two of you, as repulsive as many of the things she says are. Either way, you adjust her imagined proportions to account for her size, settle your hand over her stomach, and go about your process. You wonder if anyone else has come up with this brilliant solution to drunkenness. Most people can handle a little more than you can, but it is just so easy!

Vriska sputters to her knees when she is done, demanding a cup of water. You happily move away to provide this, at which point she quaffs it, throws up again over the side, and requests another, which she sips rather daintily.

She does not thank you; you do not ask her to. It is thanks enough not to be awkwardly touching her anymore.

Once things have had a chance to settle and your pseudo-patients are looking less green at the gills, the ship’s movement is, as you suspected, far gentler in the hold. The slight shortage of hammocks, however, presents a new obstacle. Aradia has already tucked herself into one, and Roxy in another. You usher Dirk into the last, since you’re sure he’ll feel better with some proper sleep, so it is urgent that he be comfortable, which leaves… Vriska.

She looks at you, then at him, and without a word, plops herself into the hammock along with him, sprawled over him like a weighted blanket.

Well. _You_ didn’t need to lay down anyway. You are decidedly un-tired, and you scare up a few blankets and distribute them, with only the barest hint of pique. This whole thing has really upset any plans you all might have had about getting a sleep-shift-schedule going, which is a right disappointment, but also completely fine. Far be it from your intention to make any kind of issue out of anything, ever, especially with everyone else so downcast by illness and exhaustion.

You have yourself a sitdown and a snack, regardless. A nice orange, easily peeled, quite tasty. It’s warmer in the hold, too, sharing the tightly-packed space with three other bodies. Back on deck, things had been getting intolerably chilly. You hope Kanaya is alright, alone in the wind, handling the wheel. 

It’s easy to find your coat, but you just sort of stare at it, not wanting to put it on until you have to.

“Well,” you announce, once your fingers are fully un-numbed and you are warmed through and through, your orange just a handful of peel and pith awaiting disposal. “Good night, my friends. Feel better, get some rest, you all know the drill. If you don’t mind, Aradia, I may trade out with you in a few hours?”

“Sounds good to me!” she says, and you feel a real relief at that, standing, your coat half-shrugged-on, to make your way back out.

“Wait,” Dirk interrupts. “Hold - hold the fuck up. I gotta sing. S’important.”

You chuckle agreeably, despite being almost vindictively inclined to think he’s right.

“Don’t fret, you’re indisposed. It would be kind of insane for me to be all ‘oh, you must do a song and dance’ when you’ve recently needed urgent help to evacuate your stomach.”

A little knife twist. Hopefully just the right amount to get him to give up on the idea.

“Can’t fuckin’ sing with your _elbow_ in my diaphram,” he grumbles, and you hear some shoving sounds and some Vriska-complaining sounds coming from his hammock. “It’s… just wanna get this off on the right foot, dude, come on.”

Every night, he did say. But it’s hard to deny that there have been plenty of nights where he hasn’t, and you were perfectly fine. And you’re fine now! And everything is fine. Fine fine fine. You are very cool and regular about all relationships, especially the True Love one, which is obvious by how normal and understanding you are being right now.

“Hey, you’re not the only one who sings!” Aradia cuts in. “Let’s do ‘Sailing the Diamond Line’!”

“We’re _not_ sailing the Diamond Line,” Vriska grumbles.

“Yeah, and you’re not the captain, so you don’t have veto power,” Aradia replies cheerfully. “It’ll be good for morale after three of us just puked our guts out, don’t be a baby.”

These appear to be the magic words. Aradia hums a starting note, gestures you over to sit beside her, and launches into the fun pirate-lullaby-adjacent ditty in question.

[[Tune: Barge Ballad]](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h0f7hkOYzQQ)

_Oh, we crew the grand Black Diamond_  
_Sailing the Diamond Line_  
_Her hull has never been punctured_  
_And her hold stays tight and dry_

_Well, we’ve met ships in battle_  
_Sailing the Diamond Line_  
_And now we’ve turned and their vessels we’ve burned_  
_And we’ll open a cask of wine_

_Oh the ship rides low, our hold’s been filled_  
_So keep your head up, sailor_  
_If you haven’t yet been killed_  
_They’ll welcome us to shore soon_  
_And we’ve cargo to be sold_  
_So rest ye’ now and dream of gold_

_Oh, you've got to be mindful_  
_Sailing the Diamond Line_  
_Your guns had better be ready_  
_And your powder better be dry_

_Well, we were that mindful_  
_Sailing the Diamond Line_  
_And now we’ve turned and their vessel we’ve burned_  
_And we’re Court-bound across the brine_

_Oh the ship rides low, our hold’s been filled_  
_So keep your head up, sailor_  
_If you haven’t yet been killed_  
_They’ll welcome us to shore soon_  
_And we’ve cargo to be sold_  
_So tuck on in, rest ye’ now and dream of gold_

_Oh, you must follow orders_  
_Sailing the Diamond Line_  
_For the crew is small and the timing’s tight_  
_When we’re trackin’ a loaded prize_

_Well, we’ve followed orders_  
_Sailing the Diamond Line_  
_And now we’ve turned and their vessel we’ve burned_  
_And we’ll be at the Court in time_

_Oh the ship rides low, our hold’s been filled_  
_So keep your head up, sailor_  
_If you haven’t yet been killed_  
_They’ll welcome us to shore soon_  
_And we’ve cargo to be sold_  
_So close your eyes, tuck on in, rest ye’ now and dream of gold_

_Oh, you've got to be faithful_  
_Sailing the Diamond Line_  
_For we live by the Kings and we’ll die by the Kings_  
_And our destinies surely twine_

_Well, I’m naught but faithful_  
_Sailing the Diamond Line_  
_And now we’ve turned and a vessel we’ve burned_  
_And the wreckage’ll serve for a shrine_

_Oh the ship rides low, our hold’s been filled_  
_So keep your head up, sailor_  
_If you haven’t yet been killed_  
_They’ll welcome us to shore soon_  
_And we’ve cargo to be sold_  
_So kiss your mates, cozy up, have a nip, sing a song, close your eyes, tuck on in, rest ye’ now and dream of gold_

Aradia and Roxy sing the last string of lyrics together, as though in competition for who can go the longest without breathing. Despite yourself, you laugh. It’s kind of a sweet song. Easy enough to catch on to the chorus; you’ve certainly heard it shouted enough on the final nights before landfall.

Vriska is snoring. She sleeps curled in on herself, like she’s protecting her stomach. Dirk is quietly rubbing her back, seemingly part of the way to sleeping himself.

You smile at him, sincerely, and blow him a kiss goodnight.

“Thank you,” you stage-whisper to Aradia, who smiles in response.

“Come get me when you’re ready to sleep!” she replies, snuggling up under her blanket and disappearing beneath the folds of fabric.

It’s awfully strange to hang around with drowsy people in varying states of unconsciousness, so you put your coat on properly and make your way out on deck, shivering despite yourself at the sudden reintroduction to the gelid chill of the near-winter air. You draw the coat close. It’s easier to ignore it when you can’t see yourself, when it might as well just be a blanket over your shoulders or somesuch.

Kanaya is exactly where you left her, standing like some lovely guardian stonecarving at the wheel, faintly visible beneath the light of the lantern at the aft. You mosy on over, finding a spot to stand near the carved wooden side of the hull.

“Are they all settled in?” she asks, by way of greeting.

“Well enough,” you say. “Took a while, but I’m sure everyone will find their legs by morning. If not, well, I’m happy to play nursemaid for a while longer.”

“It can be pleasant work, taking care of those you love.”

“Sort of,” you laugh, disinclined to argue the point too extensively and eager to dismiss it. “There’s little love lost between Vriska and myself, but perhaps this will be the thing that sells her on me.”

“Unlikely,” Kanaya suggests. “Easiest not to be too much better than her at anything. She takes offense.”

“Then she ought to _love_ me!”

“Perhaps she does, in her way.”

This conversation is going nowhere fast. You are totally confident that you will not need to reevaluate your relationship with Vriska in any respect at any time soon. It would be silly to waste any mental energy on the matter at all, when you so wholly have it figured out.

“Is it alright, my being out here?” you say. “I’m afraid I don’t really know too much about our course, but if you want, I can try to learn, give you a break at some point, though all that’s left for resting is the floor.”

“Of course, I’m glad to have you with me. But that won’t be necessary. I don’t sleep.”

“Ah, spiffing! Is that, er, a figure of speech, or…”

“I _can_ sleep, but I no longer need to. In the same way, my body will not deteriorate without eating or drinking, and I do not age.”

“Isn’t that just jim-dandy,” you sigh.

“That specific adjective has never sprung to mind before, but yes, I suppose it is,” she replies. “You’re kind to offer your assistance. I can always use a lookout. My policy with John is typically to trust but verify, and this is precipitously difficult in the dark.”

“Oh, well, excellent! I’ll hang around up here for a few hours, I think, if it’s not a bother. Rather crowded in the hold, since we haven’t sorted out the whole sleeping schedule thing just yet.”

“Transitions of all sorts take some getting used to,” she agrees. “I’m sure that once everyone’s stomachs have settled things will seem less confusing.”

“I sure hope so,” you say quietly.

Especially this far to the aft, the rocking of the waves is quite pleasant. You can feel her watching you curiously, but it isn’t an intolerable feeling. You are just as curious about her, after all.

“Is something the matter, Jake?” she asks, unexpectedly breaking the sort-of-silence.

“Is it that obvious?” you stutter out. “Really, am I that much of an open book? Because I swear on anything, I’m not trying, you know, to - to…”

“To solicit comfort? Whyever not?”

Sighing loudly, you slump against the side of the ship. 

“Well, when you put it like that, it doesn’t sound quite so bad,” you concede. “There is perhaps a chance that I am looking for some good old fashioned spirit-buoying and consolation and whatever the fuck. Subconsciously, you know, because I am more than capable of putting my own self to rights, it just might take longer.”

“Of course,” she agrees. You frown at her in the semi-darkness, but it is impossible to tell what she means by her smile in response. “I do want to hear your thoughts, if you would be willing to share them with me. Let’s see what can be done with regard to spirit-buoyancy.”

“Ha. If the fluid in this analogy is as dense as I am, I don’t suppose we’ll have any problems with floatability.”

The sound of her _tsk_ ing reproachfully is lost on the wind. Mostly.

You stare out over the waves, black as obsidian and faintly glinting back the orange lamplight. Vaguely, you wonder whether it is disrespectful to the Sea King to throw up in the ocean. Are there rules? Dirk probably would have mentioned it if there were rules. Maybe you can ask her what the rules are. Unless it’s just something you’re not supposed to mention, since, after all, that’s where the waste bucket goes, too. And no one ever says anything about that, either. Would it be more rude to bring it to her attention, or to accidentally keep doing it?

Hmmm.

You furrow your brow, thinking over this important question for a very long time. You decide to err on the side of caution and plausible deniability, unless the opportunity presents itself.

None of that is even tangentially related to the matter at hand - well, sort of, you can’t entirely see Kanaya without seeing something of your sort-of-friend Rose in the proud way she holds her head and her careful and deliberate use of language. You’re reminded of your conversation with Dirk back on the dock, and of the fact that you and Kanaya are very different people.

It is really hard to imagine her going off on a brain-tangent about religious regurgitation restrictions, for one. But here she is, surrounded by reminders of the woman she loves, and by people who clearly adore the Sea King. Dirk’s got her tentacles and waves tattooed on him, for heaven’s sake. And here you are, acting absolutely round the twist over nothing at all.

It would be nice, to be less like you and more like her. In fairness, you feel that about a whole lot of people.

“Is it hard, sharing her with everyone else who loves her?” you finally ask, pressing your lips together into a line. Not a great face to make, but a satisfying one. Your lip piercings tug when you do it, a satisfying sort of ache.

“A good question,” Kanaya admits. “It would be a lie to say it never bothered me. Did I tell you how we met? I pledged as an acolyte at one of the larger coastal Prospitian temples, seeking something greater than myself in the process of healing from my injuries, after… I mean, after I believed Dualscar to be dead. I was quite purposeless. Adrift.”

“There is… a place for that,” you say carefully. “The temples and devotions and whatnot. I suppose, knowing of her what you do, you took to it like a metaphorical fish to metaphorical water on the five-year path to gaining your audience?”

“Oh, no,” she laughs. “I was a friendless, penniless, half-dead maladjust with delusions of my own grandeur and invincibility who’d passed the previous decade on a feverish quest for revenge, Jake. I was terrible. I stole another ship and left in a matter of weeks, as soon as my wounds were healed, thinking to at least find some place _pleasant_ to end my own life. Temple practices didn’t exactly agree with me, either, and I’d fulfilled my reason for living. I set out for a nearby island we’d once used to store munitions, long since abandoned.”

“She talked you out of it,” you suggest.

“Rose hauled herself out of the water and asked me _why_ , knowing full well what I meant to do with the revolver across my lap, I’m sure. I thought I was hallucinating. It had been quite some time since I’d had reason to speak frankly to anyone. The leaders of revolts are rarely incentivised to promulgate their own weaknesses and failings, you understand. She sheltered me from the sun, and we spoke for hours. I found that it made a difference, wanting something. Someone. She saw me safely back to Prospit, where I found work as a seamstress and reacquainted myself with a form of existence other than a headlong rush towards _someone_ ’s grave. I began to read avidly again, and would bring my books down to the docks to recite aloud for her after my work for the day was done. She told me that, as a particularly busy God, she rarely found the opportunity to read, though she enjoyed it greatly. She held the sun in the sky to draw out our time together, and our conversations afterwards. I fell quite thoroughly in love, and never gave another thought to dying.”

“Nor did you have to,” you laugh, indicating her face, unlined by age, illuminated by a lantern swinging before her, as much as by the uncommon brightness of the stars, in the absence of the Court’s mild light pollution. The night has become a clear and lovely one, at some point.

It all sounds so simple, when she says it.

“I rarely encourage those in my care to pursue romantic relationships, before they’ve found their own two feet,” she adds, with a touch of good humor and _directedness_ that almost has you blushing, “but I recognize that I am something of a damnable hypocrite in that regard.”

“I don’t know what there would be for me without him.”

“There would still be you. And there would be others to sing to you, to care for you and to be cared for by you. To wait for you at the end of the dock until the sun set. To keep you company by the wheel at night. You wouldn’t love them any less.”

You don’t think that’s completely true. After all, you’ve met a great many people in your twenty-seven years. Just a whole awful lot of people, none of whom you could even think of loving. You’ve tried, you think about this _all the time_ , you _want_ to be capable of the good kind of storybook love, you want exactly what she’s describing, a story told after the fact, washed clean of blood and pain and doubt.

What you have is so close to being right.

“I wish I could offer you an easy palliative, but all that’s ever helped me has been time. What saved me was not simply loving her, but remembering that I _could_ love, even after all I’d ever known had been taken from me, even after I’d lived so long without it. It can be difficult to see the ocean for the height of the waves, and to see the love for the object of devotion, but one must trust its being there, even when out of sight. In time, you learn. The truth seldom comes as a single fortuitous stroke of revelation, and is almost never acquired accidentally. The weight of evidence simply becomes overwhelming.”

“Mmm _rrrrmn_ ,” you reply tetchily, leaning your face against the side of the ship, smooshing your glasses into the bridge of your nose. “It’s _hard_ , though.”

You glance up warily, something about the transparency of your own useless whining reminding you of how very uncouth it is to voice one’s own displeasure in such a way, how that is markedly not how you want her to think of you. She would be in the right to hit you, once again, to discourage you from acting like a spoiled child. But she doesn’t.

“It is _very_ hard,” she agrees, the ghost of a lantern-lit smile crossing her face, no other reaction forming immediately. “I understand.”

For a long while, all is wind and lapping waves and the slight clank of the swinging lantern and otherwise only silence. You are technically helping keep watch, so you do, gazing out into the darkness rather uselessly. It gives you a role to adopt, at least, and you sit, straight-backed, and distract yourself with your assumed mission.

Your thoughts are nowhere near as easy to rein in as your posture.

She has such a tidy story of what she loves about the Sea King, which is very good. Her words tell it for her, what she keeps in and what she leaves out. You are left without a shred of doubt as to the intensity and completeness of her affections, and with a shockingly solid understanding of where they might come from, why Kanaya is the only person you could imagine loving that specific entity with that kind of love. Neither of them is easily understood, nor easily deterred from understanding. Both have their own quiet, intense, compelling kind of power.

Where you’re pretty sure you wouldn’t be able to talk about either of them without uncomprehending reverence, for which there _is_ a place, her words are laden with tenderness and unassuming warmth.

And what a thing, to be so _wanted_ , for her words and her attention to be so openly treasured above time itself. What a thing, love. Someone ought to write a novel about them. If a person were to sit down and try to write any story about _your_ life, you are pretty sure they would tear all of their hair out by page three.

Still, you think to yourself, if you are going to say to yourself, let alone to him, that you _love_ Dirk, you ought to be able to defend your reasoning. You need a story that makes sense, like Kanaya, saved twice by a God, only to repay her in kind with the pure joy of her company and the honor of associating with such a proud and fearsome woman.

Dirk had his list, didn’t he? It didn’t convince you, at the time, but probably nothing would have. So it’s not a fair measuring stick, is it. No, but you’ve brought it up more recently than that, demanding that he prove it, somehow, and how ridiculous is it, to _ask someone_ for something that you couldn’t reciprocate! Just horrible, really.

When you try to put together a list, then, sort of bouncing off of his, trying to think of the moments that make your chest feel tight and heavy around him, you keep crashing into a wall of not-quite-understanding. Watching him paint, the sure work of his hands over knots and brushes and lines and the contours of your body, that’s a little - that goes in the wrong direction. And _almost everybody_ has hands, or at least one, so that is kind of stupid, unless you are saying that his specific hands are specifically attractive, which they are, but if attractive hands were your metric for evaluating love, well, _Aradia_ has perhaps even more beautiful hands, for heaven’s sake, and you’re not in love with her, so where does it end?

This is probably the wrong way to go about it. You could drive yourself insane very easily, thinking of the liquid warmth that fills you when something you say makes him smile, the way his eyes crinkle and his lips sort of press together when it’s an involuntary one, not something he’s putting on to try to make you feel more at ease. Ech, again with the shallow-pond superficial nonsense! As though everyone else in the damned world doesn’t fucking _smile_.

You would probably be better off writing something down, brainstorming a whole pile of ideas. Then you could go through and eliminate the ones that are dumb or vapid or meaningless, and have at least a handful of good reasons, probably. Worthwhile reasons.

Eurgh. The worst part is that you know who would do this a million times better than you are currently doing it, which is, of all fucking people, _Vriska_. She would have heaps of reasons that have nothing to do with looks or needing him to make up for personal weaknesses. Probably reasons you would never even think of. You don’t understand how the hell either of them calls what they’ve got between them _love_ , but they do, _very_ consistently, and it’s just… how can you measure up, if you don’t even know how to read the language on the measuring stick?

If the contradiction is between the true observations that their relationship is _incomprehensible_ and their relationship is _love_ , what the fuck kind of synthesis are you supposed to get from that batshit dialectic?

Kanaya sends you back to the hold the third time you nod off, slumping against the railing and waking up with a jolt. With a head that feels stuffed full of cotton, you marionette yourself through the task of waking Aradia and trading out hammocks. It's been quite some time since you slept in one, but you're not consciously aware of anything but a warm blanket and the welcoming embrace of sleep.

You don't wake from your repose until late morning, when the boat is briefly jarred. Not quite in the way that would indicate you've run aground - you figure more people would be panicking if that was the case. Instead, you shake the sleep from your eyes, leave your coat over the pillow you'd been using, and climb up out of the hold to figure out just what is going on.

'What is going on' is a little much for your sleep-addled brain to process, so you watch, more or less in confusion, as the Sea King hauls herself bodily over the side of the boat, wearing significantly more clothes and suspiciously fewer legs than usual. Her dress is black lace, which covers her from her chin to her toes, when she wobbles to a standing position, tight throughout the body, but drapey at the sleeves and at the base of the skirt. Mermaid cut. Heh.

Despite being dragged straight out of the ocean, the garment is perfectly dry, and if you had a clever comment about anything to do with the scene before you, it would fall on deaf ears.

She is only looking at Kanaya, who is only looking at her. Vriska leaps down from the lowest batten of the junk sail to take the wheel, which is good, because it might as well not exist to the ostensible captain of the vessel.

They stare at each other like they're seeing each other for the first time, long enough that you think they may continue this for a while. Then, the God of All Oceans, who is also your friend-ish Rose, throws herself bodily into her fiancee's arms, and Kanaya catches her easily, dips her like a dancer, and kisses her.

You find the clouds very interesting at this point, and blink up at the sky for a while. Not quite midday. Fascinating. It is really, really rude to stare, y'know, when the object of the staring is quasi-omniscient and could probably tell.

"Hey there!" John announces, materializing less than a foot away from you, making you nearly scream. "Did I miss the part where she crawls out of the sea like a weird monster? Oh no, I totally did!"

Rose turns, breaking away from the kiss, to make a rude hand-gesture at her sibling, over-balances, and tumbles to the deck in a heap.

"Are you still curious why we have so few family reunions?" she asks flatly.

“I think you're just _jealous_ ," John announces, jamming a boney elbow into your ribs conspiratorially and dropping his tone a few decibels, not enough to be inaudible to anyone on the ship. "She spends all her time octopus-ing around like a dumbass, so she sucks ass at walking on two legs. Oh, was I not supposed to tell them that? Whoops!”

“Thank you, John. I was worried that I might maintain some vestige of dignity today.”

“Aw, you’re welcome!” he replies, beaming. “Aaaaaanyway, can we get this super critical mission briefing in gear? Is everyone on deck? Consider this, like, tier-one mandatory exposition time, move your butts!”

The hubbub has already drawn Dirk up from the hold, and he scoots in beside you with a nudge to the shoulder and a quick kiss.

Vriska, looking more than a little annoyed to be stuck back at the wheel while something interesting is going on, calls, “hey, we never got briefings on the _Diamond_! What the fuck gives?”

“Er, you sort of did!” John counters. “I told you stuff sometimes! In a fun cryptic way, so you’d have something to think about and you wouldn’t get bored! Y’know, like, if you’ve got a cat, and you hide its food around for stimulation so it won’t freak out and claw the couch?”

“Excuse me?” Vriska replies, in a much higher octave, only for Rose to interrupt.

“We used to do this sort of thing much more often, in the days before piracy became so widespread, and our place as deities rested in the hands of only a few true believers. That changed fairly dramatically once Jade was spirited away without warning. We had to adopt a policy of greater caution in these matters. Fewer explicit _briefings_ , as my charming sibling puts it. More subterfuge, disguise, and prophecy.”

“Rose is horrible at being ‘cautious’,” John adds gleefully. “How is having a whole bunch of worship-cults cautious?”

“‘Worship-cults’ is such an ugly description.”

“Whatever. Either way, you suck at it!”

“Clearly, my trust in my fiancee of many decades is an easy way to impugn me for my conduct, and this pattern of accusations based on affiliation with and fondness for individual humans could in no way be turned around to draw the same conclusions about yourself. Please do go on. I’m sure this is new and fascinating information for our audience.”

“Pfft, I mean in general! Not just Kanaya. You loooooooove humans. Heh, remember when I was like ‘hey Rose, if you love humans so much, then why don’t you marry them’ and then you sulked for like four years and came back with a sort-of-wife?”

Rose crosses her arms, raising a delicate eyebrow. “I don’t recall the exchange going quite that way, thank you. While I may have been known to play favorites, certainly, unlike some, I have a few fairly minimal, baseline _standards_ in the process of determining -”

“Hey!” John objects. “Don’t slut shame me.”

“Oh dear. Is that what I was doing?”

“Just because you don’t get my process doesn’t mean I don’t have one. I like to back the heroes. Sue me!”

You raise your hand to suggest that you would like to perhaps press the pause button on this nigh-vaudevillian Kingly siblingship riposte and ask a question, and now three entities, including two Actual Gods and also Kanaya, all sigh in your general direction in unison, which might be some kind of record.

“That really isn’t necessary, Jake,” Kanaya says.

“Oh, sure! I just - okay. I, uh, so. Does this mean Vriska is the hero of this… thing?”

John laughs, levitating further off the deck in a gust of wind to accommodate the full-body way the noise reverberates through his body.

“That’s you, dude! Uh, you _sort of_ are. Kanaya’s doing most of the heavy lifting in terms of making literally anything happen, heh. Don’t worry about it too much!”

“I am?” you ask, moderately aghast.

“John, darling, try not to get ahead of yourself,” Rose says, bringing up a slender hand to massage her temples. You’ve seen both Dirk and Kanaya make this _exact_ gesture-expression x2 combobob, and once you see it, you can’t unsee it. Phenomenally unsettling! “None of us has a particularly well-developed sense as to how this ends. That’s precisely the origin of our interest in this endeavor, as I understand my beloved sibling has already explained. Interfering so personally in the business of humans, even those to whom we have intimate attachments, is not our typical practice. Not that you would guess with myself and John as your frame of reference, but we do try to intervene judiciously.”

“Oh, yeah, super judicious, all the time, that’s me!” John agrees, with a saucy wink.

Rose grimaces. “We _do_ try. In theory. Regardless, given the interference that seems to be at work in our collective capacity or lack thereof to determine the outcome of this quest, and indeed, the peculiar prognosticatory blind spot presented by the Ampora Estate itself… all indications suggest that the matter at hand is of direct relevance to our own affairs.”

“Does this mean we’ve got the Dead King and the Star King on our side as well?” you suggest, excited at the prospect.

“Not exactly,” Rose sighs. “I’m working on him. I can’t adequately emphasize Dave’s preference for nonintervention in such contexts without a _literal_ stick in the _actual_ mud as a visual aid.”

“Oh, sick burn!” John snorts. “I’m stealing that.”

“Please do. Consider it a _public domain_ diss. I could only imagine Dave stepping in if one of the four of us was in active jeopardy, but considering the nature of this quest, that does seem an unlikely eventuality, doesn’t it.” She smiles at you as she says this, almost conspiratorially. You glance around, wondering if she is perhaps addressing someone directly behind you. The only thing there is the vanishingly distant horizon. “Make of that what you will. We shall ensure your safe and expedient passage to the Ampora Estate, but can pass no further than its boundaries. John and I have determined the limits to which we can travel, and we will accompany you to the line of demarcation.”

“Interesting,” Kanaya says, gazing thoughtfully out at the horizon. “Most certainly an artifact of great power, then.”

“Yes. Tread carefully, my dear. My heart cannot protect you from _everything_ , and that which can compel me should summarily be capable of acting on you, as well.”

“Your advice is noted,” she replies.

The corner of Rose’s mouth tugs slightly upward, and her expression softens.

“As I imagined it would be. Alright, with that established, I open the floor for questions.”

Throughout the exchange, Dirk has been nearly silent, watching almost impassively as words and advice have been bandied about. Now, he speaks up.

“Who do you know of who’s got the juice to put up a ‘no trespassing’ sign that actually keeps the Wind King out of their business?”

“Jade accomplished the task handily with a mere fraction of her power while in the possession of Jake’s countrypeople,” Rose notes. “I wouldn’t disregard the possibility that this is a piece of Aetrian technology of which we have not yet been made aware. Five hundred years is a great deal of time to learn from our capabilities.”

“But you haven’t been able to keep track of this guy for what, forty years and some change? If he’s really still alive,” Dirk argues, frowning. “They’ve barely been out of the bubble for three months. The math doesn’t work.”

“Aetria’s borders weren’t totally uncrossable by _humans_ ,” John cuts in. “Near as any of us can figure, any Aetrian who swore enough fealty or ‘believed’ or whatever carried the protection of the boundary with them. A few people definitely left and came back and stuff. Otherwise Jake wouldn’t be able to speak Common! Just because _we_ couldn’t track them doesn’t mean they weren’t getting into antics on the high seas for the last few decades.”

You nod along with that explanation, since your novels certainly did have to come from somewhere, and that massive navy didn’t exactly spring up overnight, did it. It would make sense, too, that you would muck up any sort of god-ish protection from the barrier once _you_ crossed it. Your allegiance to Aetria itself was never all that strong, and you sure weren’t thinking about _that_ while you were on that horrible ship. Very much the opposite, as a matter of fact. How badly you wanted to leave.

“I would be remiss to neglect, as an alternate but rather chilling possibility, the existence of countless other systems of belief. We have little influence in or knowledge of the realms of other Gods. Aetria’s sheer presence on the map was initially shielded from our recognition by its patron God, though that entity is long since dead,” Rose continues. “Even that particular deity has largely evaded our insight, despite our awareness of its existence.”

Dirk shoots you a side-eye, quirking an eyebrow meaningfully. You aren’t completely sure _what_ it means, but 'meaningful' is indeed the word. Rose, if she doesn’t notice the look, notices your confused reaction.

“Jake?” she prompts. “Share with the class.”

“Uh, not sure what’s to share! The insight I have to offer is fairly limited by the deadness property of the deity in question, for the last few centuries. Twenty some-odd generations back, or so the legends go, Aetria was still largely governed by its dominant religious sect, by means of a powerful God whose name could not be written, or even spoken by any but his highest priestesses. Quite a troublesome thing for record-keeping. All that really remains of him - and it _was_ a him, that’s just about all we know, apparently the gender dealio was quite important to the fellow, making it all the funnier that he was eventually vanquished by my however-many-tens-of-greats _grandmother_ \- are the attendant customs. Some of which you know about, knowing as much as you do about me and my role in things back at home, heh. I don’t… well, I was pretty well-versed in the lore, and I don’t know of anything specific that might be useful, but if you ask, I could… elaborate?”

“Soooo… the dude had a sex cult?” John pipes in. “A whole ass freaky sex cult, and no one told me?”

“I have a cult,” Rose argues, sounding a little put out. “Several cults.”

“Nuh uh, not a _freaky sex cult_! Totally different!”

You clear your throat before your face can catch fire with the intensity of your all-over flush.

“Perhaps it was _once_ a sex cult, sort of, and aesthetically that is a little challenging to argue, so I’m not going to try, but I mean… sure, there is lots of residual nonsense about ornamenting and annointing and prostrating and training and all that codswallop. I gather the fellow was really a fan of… nubile young things, and it was customary for aristocratic houses to pledge young men as litgamella, in his service, essentially as vessels for his… yeah. Things were rather different before the barrier went up. The religiosity-slash-weird-possession thing is no longer a _thing_ , one can no longer _technically_ be pledged before coming of age, and it’s not a gender-segregated designation anymore, either. But it was. A thing.”

Crossing your arms resolutely, you wait for anyone to challenge you on any of these conclusions. Oh, when it comes to Aetrian myth and legend and their rationalization, you could run rings around _anyone_ , mortal or otherwise. The nameless god himself wouldn’t have a shot in hell at out-talking you on the subject of your own damned culture!

Only no one seems inclined to argue, and you wilt a little when you realize that you are mostly being stared at.

Rose clears her throat.

“I don’t suppose you would know, procedurally, how he was killed?” she suggests.

“Stories have it that my many-times-great grandmother, a seafarer herself who fled La Ansephemine when she was barely of age rather than submit to the God’s tyranny, seduced the stars themselves from the sky and made use of their power to… the translations are iffy, Aetrian has evolved greatly since that time period, when only religious scholars were literate, but she _subjugated_ him entirely and adopted the title of Empress, which does carry near-godly stature in Aetrian convention, though she was the last to actually wield the power of the stars. Before, er, me, that is.”

Rose’s slender blonde eyebrows just about reach the coronet of sharks’ teeth resting atop her head.

“Jade?” she calls aloud, casting her gaze up to the fluffy clouds overhead. “Would you care to corroborate?”

The light streaming down to the deck takes on a greenish hue, rippling like a heat-haze mirage before it veritably explodes in an incandescent flash. The deck rocks in response to the sudden change in weight distribution as the Star King materializes at the prow in a twirl of long skirts and a glimmer of brilliant chartreuse.

“Summon any more Kings and you may sink my ship,” Kanaya sighs.

“Don’t worry! There’s literally no way you’ll get Dave off his fancy-panted _butt_ for this, I tried!” the Star King laughs, though she begins to hover accommodatingly. “He’s still moping in his cave. Pretty sure he’s not coming out of there until he’s trained all of his crows to sing. Which he’s been working on for the last millennia or so, so it might be a while!”

Rose sighs, John snorts in giddy laughter, and the humans onboard exchange vaguely worried looks befitting the situation.

“Well,” Rose finally says. “ _Can_ you elucidate, dearest sister?”

“Uh, not much! Everything Jake said is true, though. Part of why I’m a little more careful about getting seduced these days! He only stole the _whole_ me for, like, an afternoon. Can _you_ remember much of that?”

She directs that question at you specifically, and you shrug.

“Not very well, I’ll be honest. Though I sort of attributed that to the whole ‘full-on freakout’ thing, somewhat distinct from the deity-theft aspect of it all.”

“My memory is pretty fuzzy too, and no offense, but you weren’t exactly exerting the most overpowering will I’ve ever tasted. Not to mention the fact that we aren’t _perfectly_ matched; you’re the first to be born with the right chromosomes in a few hundred years, but you’re definitely not her! Obviously none of that’s _obligatory_ , there’s a lot of interesting and _super_ complicated biophysics that goes into transferring deific power to an earthly avatar. But it’s easier if there’s full congruity, way less stressful to the host - you saw what taking on John’s power did to Jane, and that was with the benefit of loads and loads of preparation on her part! - and she and I just… we fit! It was like falling asleep in a warm bath. Then I woke up in a cell for a few hundred years, which, uh, sucked, and you and Jane showed up a few months ago with the amulet, and the rest, as they say, is fairly recent and generally pretty fresh history! Sorry, not as helpful as you were probably hoping.”

“No surprises, there,” Rose admits. “I’d expected as much.”

“Hold up, you’re the first guy in your family in - how long?” Dirk asks, honing in on what is _clearly_ the most important part of that explanation.

“Not exactly, no,” you say. “A few have taken the title of Emperor, though… well, it’s a complicated question! I figure you’d understand that. It’s typically regarded as a qualification for the role, ability to bear one’s own heir as the first Empress bore the nation, yada yada etcetera etcetera. And that’s never posed a problem in terms of inheritance, before me and Janey. We always… can. With myself being the only exception I _know_ of, but, well, it’s rather a personal thing to go _asking after_ , isn’t it? That’s just how it’s worked out.”

He raises an eyebrow, but nods willingly.

“I’d kill to get ahold of one of your mythology books,” Aradia says wistfully, staring off at the horizon, perhaps vividly imagining herself doing exactly that. “Or actually just a history textbook.”

“To be fair, I’d have to translate for you anyway,” you laugh. “I can recount any you like, as best I can remember. Quite legitimately, the majority of my book-type education once I was interned in the devotional temple concerned our early legends and such things. They’re rather boring, literarily speaking. Either a scary unnameable skeleton-god or my great-to-the-power-of-whatever grandmother inevitably hops in and resolves the conflict, typically with either genocide or vaguely-defined magic, sometimes both. The human heroes have nothing to do but twiddle their thumbs and gaze in awe or die horribly. Doesn’t make for very enjoyable stories.”

“This has all been a delightful and timely reminder that meddling in godly affairs runs in your family,” Rose sighs. “Well, we’ll keep an eye on that. Do any recounting on deck and you’ll have my ear and my attention in the process.”

“Affirmative!” you say cheerily, performing an elaborate and presumably unnecessary salute.

Dirk, inevitably, has more questions, only some of which have answers. He directs them more to Rose than to you or to anyone else, though Jade and John occasionally have better answers than their sister, and you occasionally chip in. Kanaya, thoroughly returned to the task of steering the ship, listens in silence. Vriska cuts in once or twice to join in the grilling; Aradia and Roxy are largely content to observe.

You do learn a little more about Jane’s movements, which is exciting. She’s in Derse, apparently, stopped there with an armada, nowhere near the capitol just yet, gathering forces and establishing camp to make war on them. Just as well; for all your recognition that she’d like to crush the Court beneath her thumb, for very reasonable revengey motivations, there are richer and softer-bellied targets to be taken, which would be massively appealing in the aftermath of the devastation of La Ansephemine. Troops, John reports, have dispersed throughout the countryside, difficult as it is to know how far, since they’ve mainly travelled by land, and they've avoided kicking up the kind of fuss that he would’ve heard about.

Politically, that would be easy enough to finagle as well. If the Dersian rulers’ lax policies toward the mitigation of piracy were responsible for the invasion, which is hardly even a lie, their subjugation becomes both catharsis for an angry population and, effectively, an act of benevolence. If they were ever going to protect their subjects from the scourge, wouldn’t they have done it by now? Something must change, for the good of the people, and it must change with a great deal of military violence and the public executions of the ruling parties! Hail to the liberating Empress!

Heh. At least, that’s how _you_ would frame it. No doubt Janey is operating miles beyond what you could conceive.

Either way, it’s clear that she’s positioning herself for a hostile takeover. You find it hard to believe she won’t succeed at it rather meteorically. She’s doing exactly what she was raised to do. It certainly lends credence to the story in the letter, though. To bring in more troops, to establish another base, she’d most certainly be eyeing a sprawling, strategically located and well-guarded seaside settlement like the Ampora Estate with great interest, and it would only be a matter of time before she actually moved in.

In fact, from Kanaya’s maps and blueprints and descriptions, you’re sort of surprised that she hasn’t settled down there herself already. It’s well-protected, on an advantageous but fairly distant route to several major population centers, the nearest port to the peninsula on which the capitol city is located. Should be a shoo-in.

You wonder what she thinks of Dualscar. Has he been a holdout? He must be well-stocked enough to hunker down and wait her out, then. Or else in possession of the might to stave her off, unlikely as that seems, how could you rule it out as a possibility? Either way, he’s clearly in a good position to negotiate, and if the letter is to be believed, he’s going about the process very thoroughly, seeking to press his advantage and advance his position as far as it will go in terms of signalling buy-in to the Aetrian regime. 

Tactically, it’s a clever move, or it would be in most situations. Jane is a little too sharp to be swayed by aesthetics and grand gestures of fealty, but a lesser negotiator might be easily pushed into a position of indebtedness, a sense that adopting cultural practices and paraphernalia (at great financial cost, no less!) was a dramatic relinquishment of ground that required some reciprocal bequest.

He could probably gain even more leverage through you, or might be inclined to _believe_ that he could.

The trick with this sort of lying is making the falsehood an irresistible one. To calculate his strategy and objectives, and to appear to fit in perfectly as a finishing brushstroke to the picture he is trying to paint. A patron wants, more than anything, to believe that you are enamored of them, that they are irresistible to you. A child wants to believe that they are safe in the world. A black-hearted slaver trying to pull one over on your sister wants to believe that winning an airheaded but influential and easily swayed prince’s favor is the key to gaining whatever concession he might be seeking. His own safety, sure, return of his title, mountains of gold, whatever the fuck. Powerful incentive to take you at face value when you even-somewhat-credibly present yourself as the means to get it.

A lot of things are clicking together really nicely as you think it through, a veritable deluge of useful new information. And reassurance; dear Jane is safe, somewhere, from this. You’ll beat her to him, and he’ll never have the chance to give her any sort of trouble. She will lose out on a potentially strategic stronghold, but you are certain that, once she really thinks it over, she will be grateful not to have to collaborate with such a loathsome and untrustworthy fellow. Perhaps Eridan will be interested in working with her, though you have no doubt that Kanaya will want the structures of the estate razed. Maybe you can sway her on that point, help your sister out from afar, ensure there is a rook or two left on the gameboard for her to swoop in and acquire. She’d like that.

The most disconcerting thing about the whole info session is just how little the Gods know about the Estate. Kanaya trades the wheel over to Aradia and rolls out a map, trying to establish where the boundary between access and non-access actually _is_ before you get there. Even Jade finds it confusing and difficult to associate with any actual place she’s seen, looking down from the heavens.

“We’ll play your end of things by ear,” Kanaya announces, once her papers are stowed away and everyone is a little grouchy and tired and damp from sitting out on deck for such a long time, except for the Kings, who look no worse for wear. “In the meantime, we’ll treat this as a human-led expedition, deferring to mine and Jake’s particular areas of expertise as needed. But we’ll keep you all briefed as it develops, of course, in appreciation for your aid in transporting us there.”

“Your indulgence is appreciated,” Rose says, smiling fondly.

The excitement over, John evaporates into the winds almost immediately. Jade lingers to make small talk and fluttery-eyes at Aradia. Good for her! You do a ‘nice one’ finger gun in her direction, and they _both_ notice and reply. Jade winks saucily; Aradia thumbs-ups back. It’s a little weird, how Jade exists and all outside of a weird voice in your head sometimes and occasional dream-reprieves from particularly bad nightmares. _Especially_ weird, how when she’s not all chained-up and skeletal-like, she looks an awful lot like you.

Seeing her should be comforting. You grew to like her a lot, while she lived in your brain, like a sort of… specter, a phantasm, something like that. Like a pleasant, friendly skull-haunting, despite the fact that she would have been well within her rights to be furious with you, and you are still sort of surprised that she isn’t.

She _was_ your semi-captive mindfriend. With it, your first brush with her very sincere, confusing kind of affection. Now you aren’t totally sure how to go about treating her, or even really looking at her, so you scootch out of the way as best you can. Rose and Kanaya are speaking quietly at the wheel, and you don’t want to eavesdrop on them, either. Vriska is in the process of shimmying back up to the first batten of the junk sail, and you have no intention of joining her.

Belowdeck, Roxy and Dirk are making lunch, and you content yourself to help with this relatively small task, though they are mostly done already and you are somewhat in the way. It’s a tasty enough meal, quickly thrown together and even more quickly eaten.

You didn’t expect to miss the fingers-to-the-bone work that it took to maintain the Diamond, but you think you do.

With no fish to catch, hardly any deck to scrub, and no further artifacts to price and assess, once the food is completed and et, you settle yourself down in a hammock and squint through your glasses at the pages of a book. There are no lamps set up down here, and hardly any space for it. Your reading lapses into thinking, and then to a lazy sort of almost-napping.

Maybe it’s not a waste of time to snuggle up with Dirk and talk about philosophy and whatever, but it feels a little silly to think of any of _this_ , lazing around as the boat rocks and the wind propels you forward, as meaning much of anything, when there are so many exciting things looming on the horizon.

Nearer with every passing minute.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> For your _Ascension_ -envisioning needs, picture an unholy hybrid of the [_Grace Quan_](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YqRgLZW7mUc), which is from the correct era, with the correct sail, and the correct size, but is a shrimping vessel and does not have a wheel, and the [_Silent Maid_](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LN-urGzCXQ0), which is a little too small and the wrong sail type but is the exact kind of wooden ship Kanaya would have, with a fairly capacious cabin and upper deck in the fore and a wheel for steering and a lower deck in the aft.
> 
> I recommend googling these ships and staring at them a bit because they are very pretty and cool!


	13. The Sea King's Song (or, on even stranger tides, somehow)

Among the reading material you packed along with you is your notebook, and you almost immediately get back to scribbling away in it. Not before rereading all of your old pages, of course. In the early days aboard the _Black Diamond II_ , you would transcribe the lyrics of every song you learned, to get in the habit, and so that you would have references for when you needed to come up with a good rhyme.

There are also useful little asides, though. Tidbits and factoids and whatnot that you picked up, whether from Dirk’s sail-setting explanations or Roxy’s attempts to teach you principles of her chemical exploits as she replenished the ship’s stocks. Not a whole lot of black powder for the stealing just sitting around in Aetria, you gather. Military buildings would have been far more fortified than laboratories, and she sure did manage to nick a lot from those.

Of course, you struggle with, well, _listening_ , sometimes. _Caring_ is sort of an auxiliary problem. When there is something you would rather be doing - not always, but sometimes - you have always found it atrociously difficult to hold onto basically anything anyone is saying. Unless it is something you actually _want_ to know, and are pretty sure you can’t work out without help, which it usually isn’t. That is a narrow list of things.

Your little sketch of a funny, liney hexagon with a peg leg is not actually _that_ useful as a reference, but does remind you fondly of the conversation. There’s a loose page from a different book on which Dirk drew out a sail diagram for you, and you spend some time squinting at it, trying to remember what it was meant to remind you of. Well, sort of useless when you’re dealing with a totally different kind of sail.

The junk rig setup, you must admit, seems markedly easier than the _Black Diamond II_ ’s complicated rigging and assembly, and not just because it is on a smaller ship! It only takes a few people, sometimes only one or two, to keep the ship on course when the winds shift slightly or some barren, rocky island demands circumnavigation.

Another key difference you observe is that you never wind up _that_ far out to sea. While the coastline disappears at times, fading out to a distant, bluish-purple blur like a mirage at the horizon, most days you can see the rugged, often snowcapped peaks of faraway mountains. This far out, in the sun, the sea is deep blue and perfectly clear on more placid days. It is very beautiful, and doesn’t feel quite as isolated as the true open ocean between Aetria and the Court. At night, you almost never see any signs of light or habitation glimmering on the faraway shore, but Dirk assures you that they’re there.

“We won’t be passing anywhere near close enough to see my village. Treacherous seas, shitton of hidden rocks, even Kanaya and the Sea King working together might not see us over ‘em without a bit of luck. There’s only a few women who ever get to captain the ships that sail out this far, and they know the topography of the seafloor like it’s their evening prayers,” he explains, sounding perhaps a little wistful. Or maybe just still tired, though at least he’s got the queasiness under control. Your brow furrows as you wonder which it is, and you set aside your notebook entirely.

“Would you want to go back?” you ask.

It seems like it would be sort of feasible. You’ve been traveling for a few days, the ship moving far more quickly than should be possible, with the aid of the Gods’ blessings, but it would only take a few weeks in some kind of random chartered ship from the Court, right?

He doesn’t answer right away.

“Dunno. Don’t think basically anyone would recognize me, but it’d get weird fast once they caught on, and I don’t think that’d be fun to sit through. I mean. Understatement. My dad’s probably dead by now, or close to it, and I hardly knew my mom. Not like they’d have put me on her ship. So I don’t really see the payoff. Point is, though, any settlements in this area wouldn’t be lit up in the middle of the night. Not a lot of wood to burn, this far out, since the wind keeps anything from growing past a few feet tall. Gotta conserve, since if you try to use too much of the brush, you just wind up losing whatever soil they’re holding onto, and then you’ve got a barren mountainside and everyone freezes.”

Oh. You know a deflection when you hear one, and you’re more than happy to oblige.

“Huh, I wouldn’t have thought of that,” you say, which is true. “How d’you scare up the materials to build the ships, then?”

“Wrecks, mainly. We get plenty of those. There’re also inland trade routes. Smoked fish, dried shrimp, herbs and salt to swap for timber, charcoal, a few different types of grain. It’s a different kind of living than the Court, and _hells_ of different from La Ansephemine.”

“Not all of Aetria is La Ansephemine,” you note. “We have plenty of smaller villages which receive roughly the same centralized resource apportionments-per-head as anywhere else. A little slower to get the kinds of public works projects we do in the big cities, but most are on wind power by now. Does your former village of residence count as Derse?”

“Not… really,” he says, shrugging. “Sort of? Geographically, maybe. We don’t pay taxes or whatever, but we’re sure as fuck not Prospit, either.”

“So you receive… no apportionment? How about water, how do you manage that?”

“I was like ten when I left, so I seriously don’t know a lot of the vicissitudes. We purify seawater and supplement from a few rivers, though mostly we make our own. And far as I can remember, no one was doling us out anything on the trade routes. What, you thinkin’ about buying a timeshare, dude?”

“Ha, no,” you laugh. “I have just been thinking a lot about how Jane is going to… y’know, take the place over. It seems such a daunting task, bringing a massive country such as Derse into the Aetrian way of living, and that’s assuming she manages the takeover rather quickly! It could take an awfully long time. Maybe she’ll just leave the Velvet Court alone and focus on this project, which seems far more humanitarian and worthy of her time, anyway.”

You would like that, not having to think of Jane as your enemy. It really turns your stomach, as it has this whole time, the thought of her actually trying to kill your pals, for realsies rather than as a complicated seduction or whatever. Since that must be what the rest of Aetria is clamoring for. Everyone’s heads on pikes, your safe return, blah blah blah. You already know just how quickly Dirk can turn around and, and… _skin_ someone who seems a threat to his friends. You have held the results of that in your arms and mourned over it, you _know_ that Janey would fare no better than mother against him if she really got it in her head to try to wipe them out.

Maybe you could surreptitiously remind her of all the good she could do. How everyone would stand to benefit, and would surely love her for it, if she put her head down and focused on infrastructure and parity and raising the standard of living and eliminating the whole dumb slaving problem Derse clearly has and also doing something about the upper class’s moronic attitudes about women, possibly a beheading sort of solution, you’re just spitballing, here. People would build statues of her! She could absolutely negotiate for a little god tier reverence, as a benevolent dictator, people like those a whole lot! Everyone, especially the lower echelons of society, still practically worships the First Empress, who designed the roads and the aqueducts and the turbines and the factories they power, as well as about a kajillion other things during her hundred-year rule.

That could be Jane. She could be the one they still write lyric poetry about and stamp on coins and dress up as on holidays and whatnot. If she would just… give up on the rest of it, the specific parts you don’t want her to do. She could rule basically the whole entire world, be as good as one of the Kings, and everyone would just forget about the objectionable stuff amidst all the celebrating and singing of her praises, you bet. You would gladly help her!

Ignoring, of course, that there is no way she would ever accept that kind of help. _Definitely_ not from you. And there is no reason to think that your ideas _actually_ constitute help, in any sense but the ‘please don’t give my scary friends an excuse to kill you, too’ sense.

You do feel strongly about that particular kind of thing, though, and you sigh, morose at the seeming impossibility of this endeavor.

“Maybe she’ll just toss it all and rule peacefully,” you sigh. “And maybe horses will sprout wings and take to the sky.”

“Wouldn’t rule it out,” he says, and from the laughter in his tone, you’re pretty sure he’s not talking about _both_ of those hypotheticals. “Alright, break’s over, I need to finish this, I’m falling on my own sword if I make you look stupid, and that’s a promise.”

For a while now, you’ve been in need of a haircut. It’s been a few months, and while you don’t mind it longer at all, Dersian fashion actually minds a whole lot about hair and who gets what version of it. To make the right impression, you are receiving an Aradia-endorsed trim. There are plenty of Dersites in the Court, and no small number of them have managed to die at one time or another, so she has some insight about what it’s supposed to look like.

Dirk has secured a pair of scissors, and plans on using his wickedly sharp sword for the shave-y bits, which he hasn’t done just yet, but you are really looking forward to. Sitting together at the prow, so there is no mess but fluff blown away on the wind when he snip-snips away, you are overall having a pretty good time of things with your book on your lap and your beloved at your side.

Despite your mess of thoughts - that’s always the trouble, the thoughts getting in the way - you keep being reminded that you really, truly, sincerely like these people. They are pleasant company, and spending more time with Dirk and Roxy and Aradia invariably leaves you feeling better than you did prior to doing so.

What a thing to keep forgetting. You feel more than a little stupid for relearning the same lesson so many damn times. Being alone does not always beat the alternative, at least, so long as the alternative is your very best friends in the world.

It’s not _impossible_ that you’ve changed enough that it would be worth it, trying to talk with Jane. Obviously you don’t try to voice this aloud, as you think Dirk might have an aneurysm trying to figure out how to dissuade you from doing so without sounding condescending about your progress, poor fellow. You know it might be premature, that you left things off on an unfortunate foot, that she probably-really would have actually killed you that one time and you’ve never really talked about that, or much about the rest of the tangled-up mess of nonsense between you. Just that last conversation about mother, and her plans, and your own half-baked flights of fancy, and that just made you feel bad.

But obviously you will never write her off. Jane is your sister. The only _family_ -family you have left. You know her heart as well as you _can_ know a heart without slicing it up for study. She would never hurt you on purpose. At worst, her own inside-hurt might come bubbling out of her, at times, the weight of her responsibility and loneliness, and you will always be more than happy to bear it, even if it involves a few boots to the stomach or the emotional equivalent. Proud, even! It is something useful that you can do for her, whether or not she sees it that way.

Probably she doesn’t, since she seemed so sad and sorry about it, when you talked over mother’s corpse. Your trying to insist that you were okay with it made it all the worse. Ech. You don’t even have to be thinking about this right now, or maybe ever, so why are you?

You turn your attention to your book and to the warmth of Dirk’s hand on the back of your neck as he frowns at your hair. Aradia could probably do it more easily, but she is sleeping belowdeck, and Dirk didn’t want to waste time, in case your hair needed a recovery period after his efforts.

What’s the difference between a good haircut and a bad haircut? Well, usually a few days! Heh. Sort of. You have opinions on the subject, but not strong enough to make any sort of fuss, especially in this type of scenario. You’re quite used to being worked on to a standard that may or may not have anything to do with your own, and this, at least, is for a noble purpose.

And you really, really like the idea of him scraping a blade over your neck. The sheer thought gets you rather heated, whoops. Not the time or place!

“Alright, now we’re getting somewhere,” he announces, somewhat proudly, ruffling your hair and smoothing it down as you lean into his hands and try to get your lips against his palm.

“How do I look?” you ask, feeling the back of your neck experimentally. Shorter, but not intolerably so. Pretty close to how it would be done for you in Aetria, though the close-shorn edges, once he goes over them with the blade, will be a little different.

“Beautiful,” he says, and kisses you. “But actually, I think it came out pretty even and shit. If Aradia thinks it looks wrong, she can fix it.”

“Aren’t you going to do the rest?” you suggest, glancing very deliberately at his sword, which sits sheathed on the deck. Not that you were _extremely_ looking forward to it or anything, but you were.

“I thought I might let Aradia do it with an actual razor, I mean, it was an insane idea to use my - okay, fuck, you’re breaking out the big guns, huh,” he chuckles, as you pout spectacularly and look up at him beseechingly through your eyelashes. “You fucking menace.”

“It’s a slight fantasy!” you announce, crossing your arms, knowing full well that actual sincere disclosure will get him onboard faster than anything else. “My big scary pirate boyfriend, who could easily snap my spine like a toothpick, gently attending to me with his equally big scary sword, and… y’know, the soft scrape of steel on flesh and all, and you’re so very powerful and you’ve got big warm calloused hands but you’d never harm me, and you run your thumb reverently over your handiwork when you’re finished, and also you’re holding me, except I slowly push you back until I’ve got you flat on the deck and take your sword from you and delicately run the blade over your -”

Dirk interrupts with a noise that you do not recognize, which you would probably liken to a late-stage asthma attack if you had to choose a simile.

“Are you alright?” you ask, concerned.

“Gimme a second. Fuck. You should write this shit down. Potent psychological weapon, Gods help me. I was already in!”

“Oh, so now you _don’t_ want me being honest with you,” you tease, nudging him playfully as he collects himself. “Consistency is key, my love.”

He sighs, leaning over to retrieve his sword and unsheathing it carefully. When he looks over to see your reaction, you are pretty sure you have actual sparkle-emotes in your eyes, and he laughs ruefully at your fascination.

“Don’t take this as a criticism, because it isn’t,” he says, which is never a good start to a sentence. “I get why _I’m_ into bladed weapons, on any number of levels, no surprises there. But - and again, not a criticism, just an observation - I haven’t been able to get you to pick up so much as a pocketknife for actual self defense. D’you have a reason for being cool with this level of things, or just incidental good taste?”

“You can say ‘not a criticism’ as many times as you like,” you sigh, a little petulantly, though it could have been much worse. “It is still at least a little bit of a criticism, if perhaps a fair-ish one.”

That’s exactly as much ground as you’re willing to cede on the topic. As you’ve been chatting, Vriska and Roxy have emerged from the hold below with arms full of food. Roxy joins Kanaya at the aft, bearing a few bowls of something-or-other, and Vriska makes a vague indication of offering some to Dirk, to which he shakes his head.

She hops up to her usual Sitting Spot on the lowest batten of the sail, just nearby enough that you can’t quite tell if she would be able to hear you. Sigh.

Dirk notices your reflexive slight-hunch-in response, and tousles your hair reassuringly.

“Hey, you don’t have to tell me anything if you don’t want to. Some shit’s just sensitive, it’s cool. Lean over, let’s give this a go.”

You comply readily, allowing him the fullest possible access to the back of your neck, staring down at the deep blue surface of the sea, split in twain by the prow as the _Ascension_ cuts through the water.

“I’ve come pretty close to slitting my throat trying to trim my sideburns with this thing,” he says warningly. “But, y’know, if it’s not sharp enough for a shave, it’s not sharp enough.”

The mental image makes you chuckle a bit, but the sound dies instantly as he touches you, a steady hand on your shoulder and the cold edge of the katana at your occipital. You go very still and quiet and let him work in careful, slow strokes, turning your head slightly when he directs you to, otherwise not doing anything but feeling.

“Hell yeah. I think this is rad beyond reproach, but I guess I’ll have to wait for Aradia to confirm,” he announces, giving you a little pat to the back to indicate that he is done.

You blink a little blearily as you sit back up, massaging sensation back into your forearms, which have been propping you up for a little while, and smile at him as he inspects his blade and tucks it back away.

“Did you make me handsome?” you ask.

“You’re the most handsome human being in historical record.”

He could say it a little more often, and you wouldn’t mind one bit. He’s cautious and sparing about direct physical compliments, which is sweet, but unnecessary. You’ve never had to live with such a tragic exiguity of praise before, and hollow as it was, you grew to like it an awful lot.

Inherently, it’s valuable as diamonds, when it comes from him.

You sprawl across his lap like a contented housecat, fluttering your eyelashes very prettily in the hopes of soliciting more flattery. He not only catches on, but obliges you enthusiastically, lifting you up to head-kissing range and murmuring synonyms for ‘beautiful’ until you stop laughing long enough to squirm away and kiss him properly, deeply, with a heart that feels impossibly warm and full.

Is this the sort of thing that you could write down in the notebook sitting semi-abandoned beside you on the deck? That he can read your mind, that coming from him, words that have never meant anything before mean the entire world? That you believe in him with the conviction of a thousand high-priestesses for the nameless god, that your love would put their suicidal devotion to shame?

“What’re you thinking about?” he asks, and you laugh again.

“Just how much I love you,” you say, with complete honesty, for once. “I wish there were better words for it.”

“Common is one of the easiest, actually,” he says. “My language’s conceptual approach to love is comparatively _really_ \- I mean, you _can_ say it, in theory, but it comes off weird and overwrought. Heaps of implications. Took me a while to get used to it being just a thing people say in Common, straight-up, raw-dogging the concept of love.”

“Really? Huh. It’s - in Aetrian, you just love everything. You love the weather and your neighbor and the sunset and a good packed lunch and your child and your Empress and citrus fruits and your best friend and a particularly nice brand of gold leaf or whatever,” you say. “It’s all the same word. Le, la, na, se ... ami.”

He sounds out the words carefully, frowning at the tongue position required for a few of them. You repeat them back and forth with him a few times, until he is closer to getting it.

“So I would say - na ami.”

You’ve gone over the reflexive pronouns a bit, and he’s got the right one. You kiss him on the cheek to indicate his correctness.

“But suppose I want to say that I love the ocean,” you counter. “I would say ‘imanase ami’. Imana is ‘ocean’, ‘se’ as a reflexive suffix indicates that _it_ is the it in question, and ‘ami’ is the me-specific verb for loving.”

He dutifully practices the new sentence a few times, after chuckling at your explanation. You’re no teacher, but you’re trying your best!

You make him say it again, more dramatically, several times, ee-mahn-AH-say AH-mi, until he realizes you’re messing with him and shoves you away, still chortling over his very earnest attempts to imitate your pronunciation.

You cherish every single second with him, even the difficult ones, even when he presses the issue of your refusal to pick up any of the pile of weapons in the hold, just a little. His concern is palpable. You don’t _not_ understand it. But what’s the harm in relying on him for something?

He brings it up again, midway through your impromptu Aetrian lesson, and you manage to avoid a discussion entirely by not- _completely_ -faking a panic attack, and that’s that. He holds you and lets the subject drop, as you knew he would. You continue to test him on his memory and grasp of grammar, always surprised by how quickly he learns.

There’s another good thing to love about him, you suppose. Two, really.

He is just remarkably smart, you know for certain that there is something unique and special happening in the tangled-up tissue of his cerebrum. Something you could see if you cut him open, brilliance and insight etched into each gyrus and sulcal trough of his grey matter.

And he’s _kind_ , and he tries so hard not to hurt you, and you feel like something precious in his arms, even when you are busily at work evading his efforts to help you and perennially disappointing him.

Oh well. You never expected otherwise.

Sometimes your sleeping shifts overlap; there’s hardly enough work to be done to necessitate abridged rest-cycles, but there are not a lot of hammocks. Sometimes they don’t, or you just wind up rolling out of your oft-shared hammock early in the morning to lean on the gunwale by the wheel and recount myths and legends for Kanaya and Aradia, who will practically trip over herself, even when half asleep, to be included.

There are some decent ones, and you start with those, mostly involving the First Empress. The more family-friendly fables typically do. She paved La Ansephemine’s network of tiered roads with starlight, all in a single night, and when the sleeping city awoke, their dirt pathways were lined in silvery marble. She resolved a long-running aristocratic feud between a mainland family and a lineage that had broken off and relocated to the floating city by introducing the ferry system, which forced them to discuss their quarrels face to face and eliminated the miscommunications that had plagued them in the early days when literacy outside of the temples was still a novel thing. She shaped a little daughter out of the sand of Aetria’s beaches and brought her to life, that she might have an heiress, bestowing unto all future generations the ability to carry their successors.

Only a few of the fantastically violent early stories include her. One in which she fled aboard a merchant ship the day before she was to be taken to the temple as a litgamella upon coming of age, before she was even given a name, at which point she sailed the lawless seas for twelve years, outwitting monsters and dining with queens and causing all sorts of murder and mayhem before she realized her calling.

One follows in which she returns to La Ansephemine after seducing the stars themselves, their light gleaming in her eyes, to obliterate the nameless god and, this task complete, his essence safely stored away and brought under her power for the good of the empire, to name herself at last.

Unfortunately, the details are hazy. You explain a few old liturgical debates about the meaning of ‘contain’ and ‘store’ and ‘subjugate’, sometimes ‘devour’, though the implications that the First Empress _ate_ the nameless god are popularly rejected.

“Is vore a taboo or something?” Aradia enquires curiously, and you have to discuss that for at least fifteen minutes to reach any kind of consensus, because you’ve never heard the term before and find it a fascinating idea, like most particularly non sequitur kink shit that you have not personally encountered.

No, vore is not particularly a taboo, it is just more strongly associated with the nameless god. The words evare , for ‘obtain’ or ‘possess’, and devare, for ‘devour’, are pretty similar, and get mixed up a lot in old texts pertaining to his practices. To suggest analogy between his whole schtick and that of the First Empress does amount to a sort of semi-sacrilege, in certain social circles. 

Despite her early escapades, she never took a wife, and is more of a divine-mother virgin-type symbol, particularly what with her rejection of internment in the temples and her efforts to dissolve them throughout her reign. Suggesting that the paragon of incorruptible pure pureness _vored_ the monstrous skeleton god would be tantamount to spitting on Aetrian cultural convention.

The Sea King never pops back up to weigh in, but she did promise that she would be listening, and with that in mind, you delve into the darker, weirder shit as well. The stories of the nameless god and his global conquests are drenched in blood, and Aradia frowns as you are telling some of them, only to explain afterwards that they mimic several other religious sects’ mythologies, despite a whole boatload of aesthetic discrepancies, different emphasis on different story-beats, that sort of thing.

You have some back and forth with her, wondering aloud how what bits of stories got where, which came first, who told whomst what, that sort of thing. Aradia has a truly encyclopedic knowledge of the most obscure and arcane bits of lore, and she is all too delighted to share them.

One cult shares the skull motif, but has taken the human sacrifice angle a little more seriously; another postulates a sister to the nameless god, though she may or may not have something to do with the First Empress, after a brief round of consideration of the Star King’s powers and how those manifested when you stole her.

That is kind of the thing about Aradia; you can tell her things you shouldn’t be able to tell her. Things you are still so ashamed of that you can’t look dear Jade in the eye. She is disarmingly frank, and never judgemental, always delighted by true and useful information, so you just… talk, and tell her things, and she listens and asks questions and talks more herself, and it all feels incredibly low stakes, even with Kanaya and the Sea King both presumably attending to the conversation.

The only time Kanaya cuts in is to recommend caution when Aradia begins to cite a certain island settlement’s song about a mythic female deity savior who might or might not bear some resemblance to the First Empress, maybe, and single-handedly delivered the populace from the devastation of a massive volcanic eruption at some point a few centuries back.

“I would advise you to be careful about the literal interpretation of such works,” Kanaya warns.

“Oh, sure! I mean, all stories are lies,” Aradia agrees, utterly unperturbed.

“Songs, especially, are powerful means of reimagining an unfavorable story. They disseminate quickly and lend themselves well to memory, repetition, and persistence in popular consciousness. Few think to suspect them for vehicles of misinformation, so long as they flow easily off the tongue. People will believe anything is true, if they want it to be true.”

You nod sagely, recognizing that advice from your own conception of the world.

“But desire and fear are two edges of the same blade. A lie that validates what someone is afraid of is just as difficult to forget, if not moreso. Tread lightly, and try not to read too much into a song.”

Aradia blinks slowly.

“Wow! You’ve been there for a lot of them, right? I always forget how old you are. Uh. Sorry if that’s rude! You’ve never made port in the Violet Isles, have you?”

“I’m afraid I haven’t.”

The conversation goes on, with her singing the song, you writing it down, and the both of you performing an impromptu literary analysis of the wording. For a while after that, though, you find it difficult to avoid glancing up questioningly at Kanaya every so often. You’re used to people knowing a whole lot more than you about stuff, but not about lying. It doesn’t make you feel any more comfortable, or any more like you know her.

As the sun rises, Aradia is called away to trim the sail and Roxy requests your assistance with breakfast, and the subject is mostly forgotten. But not entirely.

All the same, you have your own hobbies for your alone time. You have a little spot beside the door that leads belowdeck in which you make a habit of sitting yourself down with your guitar to practice. Once again, you turn your attention to the half-finished song for the Sea King that you’ve been working on for such a long time, though with a rather extensive break in between.

Your absence from the endeavor does, as a matter of fact, make your heart grow fonder of it. Your lyrics are not _quite_ as stupid as you got to thinking they were, and it’s easy to tweak them better, especially now that your grasp on the lore is rather ironclad.

It feels more timely, now, too. You’re excited at the prospect of sharing your efforts; even if they sort of suck a little, which they probably will, the Sea King’s whole deal of rewarding hard work and dedication to a task hasn’t been lost on you. And now you’re back on the wagon! Look out, Gods and crewmates alike, because you are humming softly to yourself and scratching out words on a page again, and it will take something more than death to stop you!

Roxy helpfully whistles the tune, when she sees you working on it, and the fact that she _remembers_ brings a rush of warmth to your heart. You don’t work on it while Dirk is around, not because you don’t trust him with the nascent secret of it, but because you would much rather cling to him like a limpet and you need both arms to do that. After the first night, he’s excellent about singing to you, whenever he gets the chance. The rest of the crew is too, though. He’s lucky to come up with one or two songs that don’t prompt at least one other person in the hold to join in, much to his chagrin and your delight. More people you care for singing for you, numerically, is always better.

Unsurprisingly, the best support with songwriting once again comes from Aradia, when she figures out what you’re doing. She writes out a staff on one of the blank pages in the back of the novel she’s been reading and listens to you hum through the tune a few times, then slowly writes out sheet music to preserve it for you.

You can’t help but notice that she avoids spending time in the cramped space below deck. She treats your project as an excuse to avoid it. You don’t comment on it; after all, it doesn’t take a genius to figure out why that might be. While the _Black Diamond_ and her successor were fairly capacious, with proper portholes and lanterns and whatnot, the _Ascension_ is rather small, and the circular windows are blocked by crates of stolen treasures and barrels of fresh water.

It has the feel of a much smaller and more menacing space, and she has more reason to dislike those than most people do. On deck, there is always a lantern or two lit and something to be seen, even if it is just the glassy black surface of the sea.

Gladly, you play a distraction and finally, _finally_ finish the song. It’s just as much a distraction from _your_ anxieties, after all, and it is a real delight to finally play guitar with her, both of you absolutely going to town on your respective instruments, since, of course, the Sea King’s song demands the utmost in terms of a shredding complement to accompany it.

Roxy, of course, must get in on it, in part because you think it needs something twangy and shamisen-like to really _make_ it, and in part because you were too excited to hold off on showing _someone_ from the second it was done. After a few delightful hours of riffing and practice, only occasionally interspersed with such comparatively unimportant considerations as ‘food’ and ‘gybing the massive junk sail’, you host an impromptu concert in the aft for the benefit of the song’s subject, as though she couldn’t have been listening the entire time.

Even Vriska is roused out of her hammock for the festivities, and the Sea King herself, without switching to her more difficult-to-maintain form, floats behind you in a nest of black tendrils for the show.

To be quite frank, whether or not it is strictly ‘good’, it is the best thing ever.

[(Tune: Siren’s Song)](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VC0SiE4iX8s)

_Waves may lap the bow so gently in the ruddy light of dawn_  
_Only to be stoked to lashing claws as a storm comes rushing on_  
_It’s no trouble to the Sea King who should meet a watery grave_  
_But to keep hold of your ship and soul, for her mercy you must pray_

_You’ll know her by her tentacles, her smile sharp and white_  
_Bourn aloft on crested waves, she makes a fearsome sight_  
_We’ll supplicate before her for her power and her fame_  
_In the meantime, pour a bottle out for the Sea King’s mighty name_

_Our timelines are play to her, she warps them with a thought_  
_The sea’s reach is infinite, time hinders her not_  
_Though few gain her favor, her love runs ocean-deep_  
_And all those she cares for, she keeps_

_You’ll know her by her tentacles, her smile sharp and white_  
_Bourn aloft on crested waves, she makes a fearsome sight_  
_We’ll supplicate before her for her power and her fame_  
_In the meantime, pour a bottle out for the Sea King’s mighty name_

_Take on her every teaching over years that number five_  
_True service as her acolyte demands you pledge your life_  
_And if you would serve her, to the depths you must go_  
_From there she will make you her own_  


_You’ll know her by her tentacles, her smile sharp and white_  
_Bourn aloft on crested waves, she makes a fearsome sight_  
_We’ll supplicate before her for her power and her fame_  
_In the meantime, pour a bottle out for the Sea King’s mighty name_

_Aetria and many other foes have fallen to her wrath_  
_Should you find your course provokes her, best to choose another path_  
_While the sea may be your first love, she’s sunk greater ships than yours_  
_Do her honor, pledge her fealty, lest you never reach the shore_

_You’ll know her by her tentacles, her smile sharp and white_  
_Bourn aloft on crested waves, she makes a fearsome sight_  
_We’ll supplicate before her for her power and her fame_  
_In the meantime, pour a bottle out for the Sea King’s mighty name_

Throughout all this time, you have been adhering to your typical Vriska protocol, which is to say, assiduously avoiding her and any situation that might lead to interacting with her. You are an expert at defusing conflict, sort of. Some kinds of conflict. Specifically, the kinds where you just let any sentiment slide off you like water droplets from your skin. What tension? You do not see it; you are looking away.

 _Literally_ ; she is on Kanaya support duty this morning, and neither of you has said a word to each other in the well over an hour you've spent on deck.

Of course, you figure that her iffyness in your general direction has always been owed to a few factors. Obviously the bad-luck thing you inflicted on her that one time, which you are pretty sure that she has not forgiven yet. Her ship, burned away to nothing, her first-mate-slash-bitch seduced by your dark wiles and no longer quite so available for bitch duties. Her fingernail, in the process of growing back, the nail bed still raw and weird looking, after mother plucked it off. She didn’t have many of those to spare, who wouldn’t get a little tch-y over the loss!

All told, it completely makes sense that you and Vriska will never be the best of friends. You have committed a great many indignities against her pride, and it is perfectly reasonable and even rational of her to dislike you virulently and probably want you dead, all the time, like you bet she is just thinking that every time she looks at you, and who could ever blame her?

Not you, that’s for sure! As far as you are concerned, that is an eminently defensible position.

It’s actually kind of comforting, the idea that she is just annoyed by your presence, at best. That is basically your entire comfort zone for other people, what you assume everybody thinks of you, in private, unless there is something to gain from convincing you otherwise, and what has there ever been to gain from you but access to your body? It’s difficult to maintain that certainty when your friends stubbornly insist on contradicting you, but Vriska is exactly the kind of honest that you have always been able to respect. She does not want you, at all, on any level, and you can be very confident that she would tell you otherwise if she felt otherwise, because she does not spare any energy whatsoever for filtering her thoughts before she voices them.

That is a nice, safe kind of relationship to have with someone. She occasionally tells you to get the fuck out of her way and you cheerfully oblige, and Dirk, if he is around, makes a reproachful face at her, and she rolls her eye, and that is the whole interaction. 

As challenging as it is sharing the same Emotional Support Dirk, you mostly seem to have reached an equilibrium. And you completely ignore them when they are chatting, as it is none of your business at all what ‘emotions’ she has, and you hope she is doing the same thing on your behalf.

Well, fine, you eavesdrop as much as the constant wind allows, which is not a lot. Just to make sure nothing bad is happening! Just to be careful and conscientious about how things are going, in case you have to make any adjustments or do anything drastic.

But you don’t. What little you manage to hear is just kind of sad. _You_ have made a lot of progress in evenly distributing your codependency around the ship, you like to think, creating a tidy safety net in case someone starts hating you, so maybe Roxy might go to bat for you if Dirk ever decides… which he wouldn’t, if he was going to, he would have done it by now, but _if_ he ever decides he doesn’t love you anymore, she might talk him out of it for you. Or Kanaya might make him see sense, or Aradia, even, though they aren’t especially close, she is still very wise and trustworthy!

Vriska _just_ has him. And Terezi, you suppose, though time with her is another thing that you have effectively taken away from her by bringing her along on this mission, which is basically your fault. And the Wind King, though what kind of support is that? Someone who just wants her for… some reason you can't really put your finger on, but there’s clearly some kind of _thing_ going on there, and you don’t just say that because you’re weird about the whole thing with Dirk getting all wrapped up in their affairs, because you’re not weird about that at all. The opposite of weird, which is normal, that is what you are.

Anyway, moving right on, you are super cool with Vriska and she is super cool with you and you are thinking about this for no reason and stopping now, also for no reason.

Now that you sort-of-kind-of know how to write music, which was always interesting but incomprehensible to you before, you have lots to work on with your guitar and your notebook, even with the Sea King’s song finished and put to bed.

You also have a few other tasks; writing out songs and translations and just a _few_ conjugation sheets for Dirk, which you haven’t yet summoned up the nerve to tear out and give to him, but you will, eventually. Sometimes you have little exchanges with him in Aetrian, and it is overwhelmingly _good_ to hear it spoken again, although his accent is atrocious. Your accent in Common is also atrocious, per basically everyone who has ever commented on it, so you’re not out to criticize. He’s disturbingly good at the actual meat of the language, though, and you can’t say you completely understand his process. 

He just dives in and _talks_ , even with a well-shy-of-100-words vocabulary, using what he has and making up cognates where he doesn’t know a word, correcting himself when you correct him, absolutely bulldozing his way through the language until he gets it right. And once he’s right, he’s never wrong again. Vocabulary is basically the only thing left to work on, since Aetrian is a lexically capacious but relatively uncomplicated-in-structure sort of tongue. Songs are good for that, and good for practicing.

It’s a pleasant enough day, cold and overcast but with the occasional hint of sun cutting through the downy grey layer of cloud cover. You slept well and woke up early, had yourself some breakfast, and settled into your typical spot with your guitar out and your notebook open. You’re trying to remember the last verse of this one kind of cool dirge for the nameless god, playing through the whole thing slowly to prompt yourself, mouthing over the words as you do it. You haven’t even put half of your piercings back in since waking up, and you’re all wrapped up in your big coat, cozy and hardly minding it at all. It’s the best sort of morning.

Seabirds wheel and cry overhead, and you watch them, trying to identify them based on what Feferi has pointed out in the past. ‘Tubenoses’, mostly, a subset of birds with funny protrusions on their beaks, through which they excrete excess salt from their systems. A few large, dark-legged and dark-beaked albatrosses. All the blackfooted kind, which are the most common.

You wish you had something to feed them. Back on the _Diamond_ , Roxy let you dole out grenadier skin and idiotfish tails a few times, to the veritable flock of birds that would form and scream hungrily at you while you worked, which was great! You wonder if these are some of the same birds. How would you tell?

They really ought to be rewarded for being so pretty and so noble and glide-y overhead. You’ve always liked birds an awful lot, even the shitty peacocks on the palace grounds, which simply didn’t know any better than to be presumptuous, feathery asshats. You can respect any creature that will leave you alone and let you watch it meander about its business for a few hours at a time. Even more if it is soft and will let you pet it a bit. Maybe you wouldn’t attempt that with an albatross, because they are large and their ferociously hooked beak-ends do not really invite domestication, but could you gentle a little tubenose or shearwater, maybe? You miss the kittens, just a bit. It would be nice to have a pet bird.

Wild animals or not, you think their lives might be less short and unpleasant and brutal if more people looked out for them.

You run your fingertips over the horses on your guitar, reminding yourself that sometimes your theoretically good intentions kill the beautiful noble things you intend to help, so it is probably better to leave them alone and watch from a distance. You’ve lost track of the song, and you stare at the page of your notebook for a while, trying to regain your train of thought.

It doesn't quite startle you when Vriska reemerges onto the deck; she does that sometimes, paces about restlessly. You're sure she misses her larger ship, her private cabin, her being-captain, even if Kanaya does occasionally allow her the wheel to take a rest or a meal herself. You nod perfunctorily as she passes, which is usually the most polite and effective way to dismiss her presence.

Except this time, she turns to face you, and she is holding two swords.

"Look," she announces. "I'm gonna bite the bullet, here, because legitimately no one else is going to, and I owe you this much. Quit doing whatever you're doing. I don't believe you can't fight, not for a second. Anyone can fight, with the right motivation! So we're fixing this whole... _thing_."

She gestures at all of you at once, and you frown at the slight.

"Hop to it! We don't have all day."

One of the blades clatters to the deck, alarmingly near you. It's a fancy old Aetrian rapier, with an excessively fancy gold-washed silver hilt and a massive citrine embedded in the pommel, a real thing of beauty, though the blade is entirely bound up in aging sailcloth.

“I beg your pardon?” you say, tensing up and reacting without thinking, strumming a muddled note before you catch your hand in place and silence the instrument.

“Gross. Don’t do _that_. Pack up the guitar and square up, come on!”

“Charitable of you to give me the opportunity,” you reply shortly, reopening your case, tucking the guitar away carefully, with a last longing stroke of the lacquered face, and shifting in your seated position to face her. “Now, what do you actually want? Is there something I can help you with?”

“Pick up the sword. I’m done owing you for stupid stuff. That ends _today_ , okay? Paid in full!”

“I must confess, I have no idea what you’re talking about, and this is hardly any way to, to, I mean, to settle things between us, if something’s given you the impression that things need settling!”

Instead of responding, she smacks you across the shoulder with her canvas-wrapped sabre.

“Ow!” you reply, quite reasonably, ducking behind your arms and trying to shield the soft bits of your abdomen as best you can. “Vriska, I assure you, this is completely unnecessary, and… rather a cruel thing to do, I am quite defenseless!”

“Pick up the sword, then, dumbass!”

You look helplessly over at Kanaya, standing at the wheel, watching you both carefully but making no immediate effort to intervene. Oh, come on, really? You are absolutely not doing this. No way, jose. You don’t actually like hitting people with swords, you have _never_ liked hitting people with swords, or hitting anything with anything, it feels _bad_ and you don’t appreciate any of this at all.

When you look up from behind your forearms, she hits you again with what must be the flat of the blade, scarcely concealed behind the old sailcloth. There’s no way she could have done this herself, these neat wrappings. You will have to have a word with… with someone!

“Pick it up!” she repeats.

“Alright, alright, if you’ll just quit it with the smacking, please, I don’t have replacements for my glasses, and it’ll look awfully silly if I show up with a face full of bruises, and some of my piercings are _very_ delicate, so… so just ease up, won’t you?”

Warding her away with your forearm still up, you grope about on the deck until your fingers close around the hilt of the light rapier she has selected for you.

“Not on your fucking life. Trust me, this is a huge favor I’m doing you right now! You _can’t_ just twiddle your thumbs like a huge, pathetic _loser_ in there if something happens, okay? Dirk won’t put his foot down, so I will, so you’re welcome! You can’t _afford_ to be useless dead meat!”

“I think I have other skills that - ow! For fuck’s sake, I picked up the accursed sword!” you whine, as she takes advantage of the fact that you obeyed her instructions and smacks you again, checking her momentum only slightly, leaving a stinging reminder of the blow across your unguarded cheek.

Despite yourself, still seated and sort of cowering, you begin to seriously assess her as a threat rather than merely a looming, hyperbolized silhouette of one.

Her sabre is too heavy for her. Her posture has to compensate for the weight of it; this makes her blows inelegant, more like you’d expect from a club or something than from any sort of refined swordwork. She has to work just to keep the thing in her hand, though that’s sure not stopping her from hitting you.

Does she really use this thing in combat? You suppose she must, but you haven’t seen _much_ of Vriska’s fighting style, mostly the hook-involved part of it. An experienced swordsperson might actually be thrown off by it. Luckily, you are not one of those. As much as it might be a point of exploitation, if you really had to fight her, you don’t care to think about that as an eventuality.

Your own canvas-blunted blade feels comparatively very light in your grip. You wish this was enough for her, the fact that you have capitulated to _holding_ it, but alas, this is not at all the case. You will just have to get out of this the old-fashioned way: by doing whatever she tells you, as incompetently as possible, until she gets bored.

“Come on, English! Show me what you’ve got!” she demands, punctuating every other word with another light-but-stinging smack, to your cheek or your shoulder or your not-sword-arm. “I know there’s no fucking way you’re as much of a little bitch as you pretend to be, I _know_ you’ve got it in you to fight back. So get up and fight! Stop cowering like a weakass baby! _No one’s going to save you_ , you have to save yourself!!!!!!!!”

“Stop it!” you sputter, still very much making help-me eyes at Kanaya, who is somehow not tossing aside the wheel to intervene and protect you with her body, which is really sort of upsetting! “Vriska, I promise this is - ow! Fuck! That really hurts! I don’t know how to - ow! Please stop hitting me!”

“ _Make me_!” she retorts triumphantly, winding up for another backhand swing.

The rapier she’s given you is pleasantly balanced and springy. Apparently on the older side, it feels well-made beneath the sailcloth, probably much-used by its former owner. This confers some advantages. You’re _almost_ certainly stronger than her, just in terms of bodily proportions, and she is waving around that bizarrely heavy sword, which affects her balance. She’s used to fighting with a hook, you’ve seen her do it, and she’s probably left it laying around for someone to trip on.

For your part, beyond the inbuilt advantages of height, armedness and eyedness - size, though, could easily become a disadvantage beneath the low-hanging sail - you are nowhere near her level of experienced sword usery. It’s been well over a decade since you picked one up in earnest, and you were never, never, _never_ any good at it. You weren’t the biggest or the muscliest in youth, didn’t have the sticktoitiveness necessary to really move from ‘going through the motions’ to ‘actually applying them, unthinking, as the situation demanded’.

That’s always been a problem. Maybe _the_ problem. You cannot get the fuck out of your own skull. Not even with blows raining down about your head and shoulders, you just can’t, you _can’t_ , how can she and Kanaya not see how cruel and useless this enterprise truly is? You can’t do this or anything! She is just going to bruise you horribly and you will probably cry and be made fun of twice as much for having done so and your instructor will act all disappointed in you and say you need to practice more, that you are too mechanical in your articulation and obvious about your next move, even though you are truly truly _truly-really_ trying as hard as you possibly can! Can’t anyone see how hard you are _trying_?

Hell, you feel tears coming on already. Would Kanaya stop her if you did cry, if she knew, really knew, how horrible and helpless this situation is for you? Someone would have to step in. Even mother did, when you cried, if only to keep you from embarrassing her too much. That was good enough, since either way, she _did_ stop the show and made sure you were okay by dragging you out of there by the ear. That was good.

The blow lands, your shoulder burns, and she goes to do it again. Everything _stings_ and you’re glad you left your snakebites in a pocket of your bag for the morning, because holy shit, she probably would have ripped them out by now. This isn’t working. She is not going to just give up.

Another swing at your face, and you flinch away again, but this time, the flat of your blade comes up to absorb the blow before it lacerates the bridge of your nose.

She laughs victoriously.

“Ha! Been holding out on us, huh? You can do better than that. Get up.”

“ _No_!” you insist, gritting your teeth, finding the right angle to block her immediate follow-up blow, the impact ringing through your forearm. “ _I don’t want to_! I can’t! I’m all woozy from being hit in the head so many times, actually, I think I’ll fall overboard if I try! It was an accident, blocking, look, I can’t do it again, see?”

It doesn’t work anyway, trying. You know for a fact that it doesn’t. Never has before.

She doesn’t seem to catch on to this, but does seem to realize that you’re going to need a little more prodding to do anything other than cower behind your sword. She takes a step towards your guitar case, noting the way your gaze flickers over worriedly.

“Hey now, stop it, Vriska, I’m serious, don’t - you’d better not!” you protest, as she lowers her sword to poke at it. “ _Vriska_!”

“Stop me, then, if it’s such a huuuuuuuge deal!” she announces, making as though to step on it, which… it’s a well-made case, and she weighs about as much as a sack of potatoes, but it’s the meaning of the thing. That’s _your_ thing. She is not supposed to touch that thing, it isn’t - you can’t, you just _can’t_...

Before her weight can transfer to her foot, you are standing, advancing on her carefully.

“ _Vriska_ ,” you say again, warningly, before she can finish crowing her elation. “Don’t do that.”

“Or what? Come on, English, you’re so close!”

“Geez louise, you don’t give up, do you,” you groan, lifting your blade and adopting something that might resemble a stance other than cringing. You remember that part of things, at least. One foot gracefully forward, one solidly supporting your weight, tip of your covered-up sword pointing to her sternum. “Fine! Have it your way, won’t you, since it doesn’t seem to fucking matter what I do! Go ahead and kill me!”

“Gods, you’re melodramatic,” she replies, and darts in all over again. “En garde, bitch!”

She is no less brutal and unrelenting when her opponent is standing, that’s for certain. You haven’t been at the ready for more than a split second before her blade is swinging at your ribcage.

You stumble back as far as you can go before you’re met by the graduation to the upper deck, evading the first blow, forced to block the second. Everything, from the roll of the ship to the weirdly ungainly quality of the sailcloth-wrapped blade to your own be-coated body has your thoughts in a muddle, renders your brain close to useless in this endeavor. You just really don’t want to get hit with things anymore, it _hurts_ , and at this point, basically anywhere she struck you would be landing on a tender spot, since you’ve been smacked around so much already.

“Vriska, come on, now, hasn’t this gone far enough?” you plead, catching an off-strike on the hilt of your rapier and trying to shove her away, rather unsuccessfully. “You got me, I _have_ used a sword before, but not well at all, and I’d have no shot in hell of making good use of one in pitched combat against _anyone_ , basically, I promise you, this is an exercise in futility! It wouldn’t take Lord Dualscar to make mincemeat of me, anyone could do it! My best move has always been not-fighting! Specifically the evasion of fighting!”

She snorts, as though this prospect is just about the most hilarious one she could possibly envision, and swings at your face.

“Good fucking gravy, are you listening to a word I’m saying?” you yelp, briefly forgetting that you are holding a sword, shielding yourself with your forearm instead, and taking a ringing, barely-canvas-blunted blow straight to the ulna, _ow_.

Alright, that was kind of dumb, but you haven’t done this in forever, no one _sane_ would dare hit you with a sword, or with anything sharp and stabby! If you were _damaged_ to the point of interfering with your work you could have sued someone’s life away, and given your societal standing, with Janey and mother as your _only_ betters, the odds of your losing that sort of case were near-zero. Tears have historically made a much better defense than any sort of swordy bullshit. After the fact, of course. During the fact, you have gotten very used to just sort of taking whatever anyone feels inclined to dish out, making yourself an uninteresting target for punishment. You can always get even later, so long as you live through it, and the key to living is almost always cooperating!

Unfortunately, Vriska does not seem to have gotten that memo. She doesn’t even pause in her relentless hacking away, it’s really quite graceless, though goodness knows, it seems to do the job well enough. Not an ounce of classical training in her technique, but that really doesn’t matter much when it’s a heavy weapon swinging in your direction.

When you think about it, ‘hit, hard, with sword’ is probably the most _classical_ style there is.

Backed thoroughly into a corner, now, barely staving off the majority of her swings, you find yourself at the end of the line. Would she actually beat you to death? Would Kanaya intervene if you were _actually_ dying? Probably, but at the moment, it sure doesn’t feel like anyone is ever going to help you. You are totally adrift and bereft and _abandoned_ , by everyone.

Catching her blade again, you time your shove better, this go-around, and buy yourself a second to hop onto the upper deck, a second after that to catch your breath as she clambers up after you. In hindsight, not your best move. The junk sail overhead forces you to crouch slightly, and as you watch, she stands to her full height beneath it with no issue.

“You _can’t_ keep running away!” she insists. “Step it up, English! I know you -”

“No, you don’t! You don’t know me or anything about me except at this point the sounds it makes when you hit me with things!” you retort, angling your shoulders awkwardly as you duck beneath the sail, still trying to menace her away with the rapier.

“I know you just need a _push_! A real push! This is seriously for your own good, you could be so much less pathetic, but you can’t even see that because basically everyone keeps enabling you so fucking always!” she snaps. “Sword up! Come on!”

“No!” you repeat. “No, no, _no_! I’ve no interest in any of this, isn’t that obvious? You are not doing me a favor! This is not evening out any sort of debt between us, you owe me nothing and I owe you nothing and I was really very content with that state of affairs!”

“That’s such bullshit,” she snorts, engaging you with another volley of blows. Despite the challenge of the sail above your head, you’re warmed up, now, and you parry each in turn. She doesn’t shake things up very much, always strikes more or less the same way, with the same full-force, unrestrained power. The lack of variety makes it pretty easy to calculate responses. It’s kind of like fighting a freakishly strong child, once you get used to it.

Half of her fighting skill, you figure, is in the combination of swordwork and, er, hookwork? Whatever that might be called. She keeps making little gestures with her scarred-up arm, like something isn’t there that should be there, if she were really trying to kill you.

This style of engagement would be a lot more effective with a second weapon. Even once you figure out her pattern, it’s phenomenally distracting, having to constantly engage with her sabre, no breaks between the flurry of blows. Not a bad moment for her to slide under your reach and get a hook into something soft and squishy.

Most of her defensive acumen, though, seems to be in the form of constant, unrelenting _offense_. That said, you haven’t really pushed back, well, at all, so you don’t exactly know how much it would throw her off-balance to do so, in the absence of her typical secondary weapon.

As you think this, you slow a little too much in matching her sword-strokes, and she gets in under your defenses, again, and gives you a sharp smack across the stomach.

Ow, damn it all!

You’re actually very grateful for the coat, for once, because it muffles the impact quite a lot. It’s cold and windy as ever, too, though the exertion of trying to stave her off has sweat beading on your brow.

Fine. Fine, fine, fine. If she wants to see you fail horribly, and prove just how pitiable and incompetent you truly are at this business, _fine_! If that’s what will get her off your case, convince her once and for all that you really ought to be ignored whenever possible and at worst occasionally mocked, you’ll do it, you’ll play along, that really _is_ the path of least resistance, no matter how humiliating. At least it will be over once she gets tired of you. That is always how it goes. Maybe when the bruises start showing, Dirk will yell at her a little on your behalf. Unless he put her up to this.

Did he put her up to this? Oh Gods, you don’t think you could stand that, if he did. If he wants you to suffer, he ought to do it himself. You would at least be able to figure out how to like it if it were him. There is _nothing_ to like about being kicked around by someone who does not even love or want you at all. You don’t buy Vriska’s insistence that this is an act of affection for one solitary second.

Either way. Any way! The only way out is through.

When next she winds up for a high swing - you can guess at it by the angle of the blade, she prefers to hit you with the edge - you lunge in first, making no effort to parry her, but instead slashing down her ribcage. You immediately hit your head on the lowest batten and curse, but it surprises her enough that she forgets to swing at your face.

As you edge away, rubbing at your sore forehead, wishing you didn’t have your glasses on, you see her smile grow wide. Your heart sinks.

“Not a bad start!” she calls.

Is that supposed to be encouraging? It is not. You are desperate for a way out, and you have just made the situation worse.

“I don’t want to do this,” you reply, plaintively. “I don’t hate you, not in the slightest, I promise! I don’t want to hurt you, I don’t want to hurt anyone, I don’t _want_ this! Can’t we call it even and forget about whatever’s got your feathers ruffled? And this? I won’t say a word about this to anybody if you just call it off, we can go back to - to ignoring each other, that was nice!”

She is completely immune to your eminently reasonable offer, not that you would have held to it once the swords were down, would have ‘accidentally’ let it slip to Dirk within the hour. But sometimes that works, that sort of line, reminds people that _they are being the bad guy_ , and no one wants to be the bad guy! Except the ones that do, but there’s no stopping them, nothing to make it worse or better than it inevitably will be.

You’re pushed all the way to the prow, your footing unsteady, glancing nervously down at the waves, keeping one eye on her at all times. It looks desperately cold. You can’t swim. Couldn’t even try, really, in a coat this cumbersome. The Sea King would rescue you, right? Or Kanaya, if she saw you fall? Would she even see, if the ship went over you, at the speed you are currently travelling?

What a stupid way to die! Your eyes are wet and your face feels hot and you are such an utter fool, this is entirely your fault, you should have known that Vriska would pull something like this, you shouldn’t have brushed aside Dirk’s continual offers to re-teach or practice or whatever, you shouldn’t have _gotten up_ this morning. And now you are crying and it is fogging up your glasses.

“Fucking hell, English, stop bawling, I’ve given you like eight chances to just fucking stab me and get it over with, are you even trying?”

“No!” you insist, on top of a helpless sob. “I’m _not_ trying! I told you I didn’t want to, I told you I told you I _told you_!!! I don’t want to stab you, even though you seem to want me dead, and you’ve been nothing but rude to me, don’t you get it, that doesn’t mean I hate you or want to hurt you! Not everyone is like _you_ , Vriska!”

“Obviously!” she sighs. “But you’re _not_ better than me. You get that, right? You wouldn’t last a second on your own!”

“Trust me, I’m aware!”

“You’re so fucking used to acting like a pathetic little babydoll who just needs scooping up and saving that you can’t even imagine an alternative! Look at you! You’re three times my fucking size, someone _taught_ you how to use a sword, Strider would cut off his head for five minutes to show you the ropes without you bitching out about how it makes you _so sad_ to _maybe someday_ have to stand up for yourself, it makes me want to _puke_! He’s so fucking whipped, but you’re even worse! You should be kicking my ass right now! I have one hand, dipshit, I started it, you’ve got every excuse in the world! I can’t make this any easier for you!”

“I _can’t_!” you wail, loud enough that she must hear the fear and piteousness of it, even over the wind and surf. You want to collapse on the deck and cry. She’s right, of course, she’s _right_ , you’re horrible and worthless, no matter how you’ve fooled everyone else, you’ve squandered everything you’ve ever been offered, by Dirk and through your station and by your teachers and in every other situation. She’s the only one who _sees you_ , she’s the only one smart enough to hate you, somehow, she’s right.

“Even your shitty fucking mom _fought back_!” she hisses, and brings the edge of her sabre in, hard, against your temple, jarring your glasses off your nose and down to the gold chain around your shoulders.

You don’t actually feel it, though, and probably wouldn’t have, even if your bridge was still in.

She doesn’t seem to register your lack of a reaction, this time, that you forgot to flinch away. You raise your rapier again as she swings back, her padded blade catching at the hilt of yours. You force yourself to breathe. She notices _that_.

“Did he not tell you?” she asks, dropping her tone for just a second. “Fuck.”

“No,” you reply, inflectionless, tension still keeping your arm locked in place, your grip digging the pattern etched in the hilt of the sword into your palm. “He didn’t.”

You need at least an hour to sit back down and clutch your guitar to your chest in silence and _think_. Just to make your brain work again. It feels like your heart has stopped beating. Why should this be a surprise to you? Does it make any difference, how she died? It doesn’t change the ending, to know the parts of the story that were left out. Her corpse is ash and a gilded skull in the empty throne room. Whoever held the knife, _you_ held her body, her blood soaked through _your_ skirts.

It would probably take more than an hour, and you have maybe half a second.

“I’d thought it was Dirk,” you say, very very quietly.

What with the skinning. It seemed like the sort of thing he would do.

“As if. He doesn’t _get it_. No one ever hurt him like that. Nobody ever ruined _him_.”

“I’m - I wasn’t…”

“Yeah, well, the bitch struggled ‘till she fucking died.” She shakes her head, spilling her dark curls over her shoulder. When she opens her eye, the flicker of doubt in her expression has evaporated. “You sure you’re related to her? ‘Cause she didn’t cry. She _screamed_.”

You blink, once, and slide your blade out from under hers with a slight chafe of sailcloth-on-sailcloth. Without more than a milisecond’s windup, you strike her across the face with all the force you can muster.

She stumbles back, grinning eerily. “There we go, now you’re -!”

Pressing in from the apex of the bow, you don’t give her the chance to finish that sentence. You don’t want to hear it; you can hardly hear anything over the rush of blood, your own suddenly haywire heart rate.

The second time, you don’t catch her off guard. She’s no slouch with that sabre, parries skillfully when you aim a second swing at her face. Her blade meets yours, and she moves to regain her lost momentum and strike you again, but you dip down and around her sword in a messy but effective circular disengage. It’s been a long time since you did this, but it didn’t _go_ anywhere.

Her trajectory diverted, you lunge in to stab her in the solar plexus. Your bladetip may be covered in canvas, but it’s more than enough to send her stumbling, back on the defense, teeth bared as the breath is knocked out of her. It’s a dance you don’t forget.

She opens her mouth as though to say something else, and you strike her again, square in the face, to preempt it. You can’t hear her speak anymore. You don’t want any more of it. You want to see her bleed. She doesn’t stop fighting back, but you didn’t expect her to. Her sabre bruises your shoulder, jars your grip as you block the next one, and the next. Your forearm might be shattered or might have fused together like a statue carved of marble, you can’t be sure which.

It hardly stops you for a second, advancing back towards the aft, when you hit your head on the lowest batten of the sail. You shake it off like nothing. The only box that anything can fit in, for a moment, is a kind of white-hot, brain-melting anger. You’re not sure why. You’re not sure why you feel this way. You want her dead, want to dig the skull out of her face, want to cut her open and take your mother back, like she _swallowed_ her, like you might be able to retrieve her from somewhere inside of the fragile body quickly losing ground on you.

Mother would have killed her, surely she was just defending herself. You have no right to be so angry. You have no right to hit her, over and over again. But you do, and it feels very, very good. No reservations, no dark, slippery associations. Just rushing blood in your ears and leaking from her nose, which you might have broken, you heard a sound even over the thunder of your heartbeat.

She makes a gurgly noise.

You’re not completely sure how you wound up on top of her, an arm across her clavicles and the other pinning her sword hand in place over her head. Your own weapon is long tossed away, clattered down to the lower deck. You are trying to kill her.

Blinking, again, you release some of the pressure on her throat, and she coughs, then knees you, hard, in the groin.

More with shock than anything, you roll off of her, winding up on your back, staring up at the sail, breathing heavily.

“I don’t want to hear any more excuses,” she rasps.

“No, ma’am,” you reply, your voice equally hoarse.

She laughs. That’s it, the sound that snapped you out of it. Laughter, spilling crimson blood down her chin.

“Maybe you have potential,” she concedes. “I mean, you had to. Strider’s taste can’t be _that_ bad if he hangs out with me.”

You don’t say anything. Your whole body feels like it is humming. You are still periodically forgetting how to inhale. What is there to be so damn mad about? She didn’t - when you thought it was Dirk, you didn’t want to kill _him_ , did you? Why should it matter? It shouldn’t. It shouldn’t. But it does.

“I’m sorry,” you say softly.

“Shut the fuck up. Eight more seconds and I’d’ve kicked your ass!”

“I didn’t mean to, though. I really didn’t. I don’t - I don’t hate you, not even for this. I _don’t_ hate you.”

“Aw. I don’t hate you either!” she says, doing that bizarre, painful gurgle-laugh again. “Why the fuck would I hate you? You’re weird as shit, and kind of completely insufferable, but have you met my crew? Pfft.”

“You don’t? I s’pose I thought you did.”

“I hate your _bullshit_ ,” she snorts. “But I hate mine, too.”

“Ah, well, same, I guess,” you sigh, slumping back against the whitewashed deck. The coat feels too warm, now, and you put some effort into unclasping it and stripping it off. It makes quite a large pillow, even a little beaten up, as it is now, and you indicate that she may rest her head on it as well if she likes.

“Just till my nose stops hemorrhaging,” she grumbles, scooting in and propping herself up.

“Did she say anything?” you ask.

Vriska makes a confused exhale-y noise in response.

“My mother. When she died.”

“Kinda quieter screaming. Not much else.”

“Oh.”

“Why should you give a shit, anyway? I saw how she treated you,” she says, accusingly. Her indignation is as fresh as it would be if she were recounting an event from a few seconds prior. “She doesn’t deserve you giving one single fuck about her. Only thing I feel bad about, actually, is that you didn’t get to do it yourself. That’s what I _owe_ you. I always wanted to...”

You know her story. You know what she always wanted to do. But it isn’t at all the same. It _isn’t_. She never loved the Mothers on her isle, did she? They never carried her inside their bodies. They were never _supposed_ to love her, and from Dirk’s explanation of her backstory, she never much cared about earning it, either way.

It doesn’t seem like the right moment to try to argue that, though. You can’t argue something if you aren’t sure what you even mean. What you could even be trying to say. What you feel. Where the fuck that-all came from. As quickly as it set on, the all-consuming anger has dissipated, mostly, leaving you shaky and even more hollow than before.

“Did it make you feel better?” you ask.

“No,” she says curtly. “It didn’t.”

That leaves you even more confused. You don’t think she knows any more than you do about the minefield she’s wandering around in. Whether or not it’s the same minefield as yours. When you glance over at her, she is staring determinedly up at the cloudy sky, blood crusting in her nose and at the corner of her mouth.

“Just don’t fuck it up,” she says shortly. “Don’t fuck this up, English! Don’t wimp out and fuck him over because you’ve got unresolved shit. Don’t… make it my fault.”

“Why, for crying out loud, might my nonsense have anything to do with _you_?” you snort. The movement hurts your ribs. You are definitely going to have a whole lot of bruises for your troubles. “I think you might be projecting a little bit.”

She grumbles something noncommittal, tries to nestle more thoroughly into the coat, and winces slightly.

“...well, I’m as parched as a several-hundred-page novel,” you announce. “Perhaps we ought to… hop down, clean up a little…”

“I was planning on laying here for a while,” she says, then glares at you, remarkably effectively for the fact that the expression is only conveyed via a single eye. “Don’t look at me like that, I’m fine, d’you actually think you could hurt me? _Please_.”

You don’t say a word, but you do bring her up a cup of water and a rag to wash up with, since the congealing blood, in your experience, is not very comfortable. Below deck, you replace your piercings, have a little to eat and drink yourself, and settle back in outside. Vriska’s boots still hang down from the upper deck. You don’t bother retrieving your coat, just kind of huddle up behind your guitar, get your notebook open, and resume distracting yourself. It seems like the right thing to do, to indicate that really, you have no hard feelings at all. In case she didn’t believe your reassurances.

Surprisingly, you genuinely don’t. It helps not to think about it, and doubly helps that she straight-up _said_ she doesn’t hate you, and you kind of trust her? It’s strange. You suppose you’ve known her just as long as anyone else on the _Diamond_ with you. You just didn’t think you’d ever… talk. Aesthetically, at least, she always seemed just as terrifying as Dirk, in her way, and with no soft center to make up for it. Perhaps you haven’t made much of an effort.

It’s really hard to resent someone after beating them to a pulp, also. You find your canvas-wrapped sword, tear the bloodstained fabric off it, and toss it below deck, in the weapon pile. This begins to rouse the rest of the crew, and Dirk is half awake by the time you’re back to mucking around with your guitar.

You don’t hop up to greet him, though, when he climbs up into the aft and stretches, yawning in the late morning light. He squints at you for longer than usual. Ah, right, all the bruises.

“I’ve been clumsy this morning,” you announce. “Tripped down into the hold earlier. Rather spectacular, really, tragedy that you missed it!”

He laughs, then tugs on Vriska’s boot until she yelps reproachfully and tries to kick him in the head.

“Fucking hell, what happened to _you_?” he demands, looking up at her in earnest. “The fuck did I miss?”

“Tripped,” she says curtly. “Someone’s got to fix the top step. Kanaya’s stupid boat is falling apart. This neeeeeeever would’ve happened if we took _my_ ship!”

“The top step is fine!” he insists, though he actually goes through the motions of inspecting it, apologizing to Kanaya all the while for entertaining this frivolity.

In a fit of pique, he turns back to you, midway through a song.

“Jake, come on, I missed something legitimate. What’d I miss. I actually need to know if something serious happened, if there’s going to be a thing. Please, for fuck’s sake, tell me if this is going to be a _thing_.”

His distress is palpable.

“Promise I’ll tell you about it later, dear heart, it’s hardly an urgent concern, there’s no reason to trouble yourself,” you say, patting him on the cheek. “In the mean time, I’m not going anywhere. Why don’t you do a proper check-in with Vriska? She seemed a little out of sorts, earlier.”

He raises an even more skeptical eyebrow, kisses your forehead, right on the fresh bruise, and climbs up onto the fore. You finish transcribing the ode to the nameless god, and the seabirds wheel and cry on the wind overhead. It’s only a little nerve wracking, not being able to hear them speak, and not even trying.

“Did you sort that all out?” Kanaya asks from behind the wheel, watching you with her typical impassive affect.

You shrug. “La Ansephemine wasn’t built in a day.”

“No, I’m sure it wasn’t. I apologize if you feel I ought to have intervened. I was worried, myself, about how you might fare on your own. I watched Dualscar kill my mother, when we were both little more than children. And I couldn’t raise a hand to him, even in my own defense. I had to know. That you could be better than me.”

“Well, that’s not even remotely the same thing! I haven’t been a child in a very long time, I’ve _got_ to figure this stuff out, and I’m closer to it now, probably, and I don’t blame you for a second. For making sure.” You grimace a bit, which hurts all the more for having your piercings back in, lest they close up on you. “ _Are_ you sure, then?”

“Yes,” she says, without hesitation. “I believe you’ll do what needs to be done.”

You wonder just how much she saw, what she means by that. But those aren’t answers you _need_. You just wonder.

There are a lot of things you wonder, settling back, your fingers on the frets and the strings once again, playing the devotional songs from your youth, a few that you recall from particular ceremonies. Jane’s coronation as heiress. Piercing ceremonies, the consignment of new novices to the caro supellecta, which you were required to attend, when you were still housed and trained with them. Your coming of age, when you formally received your name and new designation as litgamella.

You don’t remember being angry, but perhaps you do remember being afraid. You were so much smaller, then. And you got over it quickly, because you had to, because you would be useless if you didn’t, because no one wanted you, weeping and frightened, unless they did, and that was somehow worse.

The fact that you figured it out before probably means that you will figure it out this time, too. Faint silhouettes in the grey sky continue to scream and dive and skim over the surface of the sea. More seagulls, now, than before. It won’t be long before you reach the Dersian blockade, and with it, the last challenge to overcome before you arrive at the Ampora Estate.

You have a lot of things to think about, but you put them off, for a while, and watch the birds.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Next chapter, we _finally_ hit the manor. It's all smooth sailing from here, obviously!


	14. Not Today! (or, for love and money)

A pair of towering mahogany doors span the whole of the distance between the marble floor and the vaulted, gold-washed ceiling far overhead. They’re ancient, as old as the palace structure itself, but regularly maintained. Familiar. On the right door, a fearsome depiction of the nameless god, as a massive, winged snake, composed of bone and fire, a human skull completing the effect, is carved-in and painted-over, finished to a glossy polish. On the left, a depiction of the First Empress, her sabre raised as though mid-swing, in the stance of a skilled warrior, challenges him, her dark hair streaming over her shoulders, her expression hidden by the angle of her face as she stares him down.

It’s the grand entry hall to the imperial deliberation chambers. One side opens out to a sprawling view of La Ansephemine, the other looking into the palace gardens. The light spilling in from the sunset is almost tangibly thick, liquid gold forming a sharp gradient with shadow where it’s broken by the intricate wrought-iron railing.

Two enormous wolflike dogs, each carved from a single massive boulder of pale green jade, stand guard outside of the chambers. They tower overhead, almost to the ceiling, no less than three times the height of the tallest of mother’s coterie of attendants. You sit at the base of one as you take in the scenery, approximately where you were summoned to wait, slouching over a toy horse, trying to make it prance realistically along the marble floor. One by one, you tap its little hooves against the stone.

“You’re doing it wrong,” Jane informs you, nudging you with her shoulder and trying to grab the toy. “A canter is a three-beat gait.”

“I know,” you insist, wrenching it back and holding it protectively to your chest. “I _know_ that, suppose I was trying to make him trot, huh?”

After a strange second, suspended in time, you realize that you’re both speaking in Common. So you must be dreaming. Huh. Looking down at yourself, you’re not entirely sure if you’re eight or… however old you are. You’re about twenty-seven, you think, but you may have forgotten a birthday somewhere in there. The familiar toy is oversized and heavy in your hands, and the statues overhead feel much larger and more imposing than they did the last time you spoke with Jane in mother’s office. This is a remembered dream, from a child’s perspective.

You know, implicitly, that you are waiting for something to happen.

“I don’t care,” Jane says. “You’re doing it wrong, either way!”

“Not like you’d do it any righter,” you argue, unable to deviate from the inertia of the dream-dialogue, words you know you’ve already spoken.

Jane is definitely a child, looks a child and all, curly dark hair and dimpled cheeks and wearing child's clothes along with her uncharacteristically mature frown. But you’re still not totally certain what _you_ are. You both pierced your ears at eight, and hers are whole. You can feel your first standard lobe in, and it stings like an afterthought rather than a distraction. Fresh. That tells you more about where you are, temporally. Somewhere very near your birthday, not yet to hers.

She tries to take the horse again. You’re supposed to share most toys, after all, though you have an awful lot of them between the two of you. Beautiful porcelain litgamellaforma in dresses as fine as any you’ve seen mother wear, an entire doll-castle full of miniaturized furniture and a second set of porcelain royals to inhabit it. Ornately garbed little cast-iron soldiers, their mounts and weapons all decked out in gold-washed imperial garb. Armies worth of those, which the two of you have spent many a day indoors lining up and having pretend-wars over nothing, inventing convoluted backstories for Imperial General Croft and Rebel Emperor Sebastian, yours and her favorite dolls, respectively. They are secretly brother and sister, but neither of them knows it yet, and as a result, they are sworn enemies and the subject of many melodramas.

All that to say, she could’ve brought down _any_ of the figures, but she wants this one, of course. The best of the horses, the only one not outfitted in military dress, just a horse carved from rare alabaster onyx, posed mid-stride, with little chips of green garnet for eyes. He’s proportionately too large for Imperial General Croft to ride, since you can’t change her stance and she’s meant to be posed atop a warhorse from the same toy set, but that doesn’t usually stop you from pretending.

“Give him back!” you insist, yanking it out of her slightly-smaller hands as she tries to twist it away from you.

Internally you wince, knowing how this ends. The horse flies out of your grip when she lets go, both of you gasping in horror, and one of his delicate outstretched legs shatters when it makes impact on the marble floor.

You scramble to try to retrieve it, to pick up the pieces, since maybe it can be molded back together somehow, as Jane crosses her arms and huffs indignantly, turning away.

And now you know exactly what day this is, and exactly what mother is going to tell you when she emerges from the deliberating-room, and exactly where the palace guards are going to escort you off to, their rough-edged gauntlets digging into your wrists to stop you from wriggling away on the short journey to the devotional temple, where you _don’t want to go_ , you don’t want to leave. How terrified Jane will look as they haul you off. How she won’t raise her voice to mother, not with the knowledge that it could be her just as easily.

You know where the sense of quiet dread is coming from. You know that the little onyx horse’s leg is fully shattered, beyond repair, as is its face, and no amount of scooping up shards off the cool white surface of the floor is going to change that.

An attendant will emerge from the corridor, soon, and sweep up the mess, and in a minute, you will be dragged past that same attendant, too stunned to weep properly. And everyone in the palace will know that mother has made her decision as to who will be her successor. It won’t be formalized until Jane’s coming of age and naming ceremony, when she turns thirteen. Mother could always have another child, should both of hers prove unsatisfactory. The litgamella have always served the imperial family faithfully, and if she wants another, she will have one a few months from tonight, no strings, no negotiations, no names attached other than her own. But _your_ fate is set in stone, now.

Jane was very small, standing beside one of those enormous green-stone guard dogs, watching as they tore you away, mother already having disappeared back into her chambers. Sometimes there is nothing you can do. You could not have struggled any harder. She could not have saved you. You were both just children.

She’s gone when you look away from the shattered horse-figurine on the floor, and so is the figurine, when you glance back down. You stand to your full height and dust off a familiar summer gown. One of your favorites, fitted in the waist, with a low neck, made of frothy golden-yellow tulle, the sleeves voluminous and nipped-in at the wrist, the bodice embroidered with seed pearls that similarly run up from the hem. It wouldn’t fit anymore, were you to try to get it on, if no one’s burned it or sold it yet, but in the dream, it’s just as you remember.

Your immulatio are once again warm and soft around your ankles and your neck. The palace is twilight-dark, the statues casting longer shadows still in the waning light of late sunset. You’re no longer caught in the inertia of a memory, and when you try to walk, you can. Your feet are bare, and the marble is cool beneath them.

There are no handles on the heavy doors, but as you raise a fist to knock, they yield and open.

Rose stands in your mother’s place, her gown severe and high-collared, intricate black lace in tentacle-reminiscent swirls covering her dark skin from chin to wrist, yielding to a long cape that trails behind her as she steps into the hall.

Back when you possessed Jade, or she possessed you, or whatever, she would come to you in dreams. Usually the drowning ones, when she would hold your head up in the vast, dark ocean of your mind and help you float until you woke. It’s not unexpected, a King showing up, aborting the nightmare before it can quite reach the most horrible part.

She smiles toothily and you bow, a proper, formal Aetrian greeting, dipping low and swirling out your own long skirt.

“It’s a pleasure to see you, Jake. Interesting mind-palace you’ve constructed. I don’t suppose I had the opportunity to appreciate Aetrian architecture all that much, in the process of destroying it.”

Your face colors instinctively and you lower yourself into another half-bow to conceal it. “Ah, thank you.”

“Your diffidence is charming, but unnecessary. What, did you believe I’d permit you to follow my fiancee into this crusade without a direct discussion of what exactly that entails? Face to face, as it were, without the cumbersome constraints of material reality?”

“Well, er, no, not really,” you say, a touch awkwardly. “But what’s there to say?”

“I’m not here to prevaricate about the vicissitudes of your strategy, worry not. But I’ve always considered myself somewhat insightful on matters of the mind. Your dreams are as troubled as your thoughts, and Jade isn’t in a position to sort them out for you, I’m afraid. I will have to suffice.”

“Oh gracious, what’s the matter, is she alright?”

“She doesn’t yet walk easily outside of her mythic purview. Five hundred years held captive, away from her believers - she has a great deal of ground to make up. But she did wish to relay her apologies for nonpresence. Apparently she quite enjoyed the talks you two had in the center of your subconscious.”

“Did she?” you ask, looking back up in surprise. “I thought I mostly whined about my feet hurting and how terrible boats smell.”

“With utmost respect, I’m sure you did exactly that, among other likely prosaic complaints. However, you may underestimate the value that these stories would have held for her. It’s a meaningful thing, connection with humanity, experiences that resonate with what we used to be, back in the day.”

“Wait, was there a day? I mean, were you a pirate once? What exactly are the Gods?”

“All good questions, if more or less the same one,” she sighs, lifting a delicate hand to her brow and skirting around you, the cape-train of her gown rustling against the marble as she moves to the railing, looking down at the seas that surround La Ansephemine.

The sun hasn’t set at all, the weird sense of twilight unchanging as you speak with her, and she continues to thrum with dark energy, a being of shadow against the horizon. She certainly doesn’t _look_ like anything that ever could have been human.

“We all began somewhere, as something,” she says, by way of explanation. “Gods are conduits for belief. Representatives of broader natural forces who could serve as avatars for growing common convictions in a populace, with the arcane knowledge to leverage that power. Our reach spans as far as that of the people who believe in us. We exist, suspended in that belief, for as long as it lasts. Fortunately, tangible concepts such as ‘the ocean’ and ‘death’ tend to linger, once given face and agency. Having channeled such a conduit of widespread conviction, it is nearly impossible to erode that level of belief, save for enacting a genocide. Over time, a God becomes the apotheosis of association, the fastigium of collective knowledge. But for every end state, there is a beginning state, and for every being of great power, there was once an individual who dared to wield it. Does that make sense?”

“Uh, sort of,” you say. “So you were a person?”

“Yes,” she says, a touch wistfully, you think, her face remaining impassive despite her tone. “From what is now the Dersian port of Lolar, where the foremost of my temples operates. We typically avoid discussing our origins with humans as a matter of principle; knowledge of the humanity central to our beings tends to erode faith, which is the currency in which we trade. Though not for you, hm?”

“No, not really? My Gods have always been once-human,” you sigh, gesturing up at the painting of the First Empress, her sabre raised in castigation to the celestial cruelty of the nameless god. “You’re right, of course. I appreciate your letting me in on the whole subterfugenous jiggery-pokery of it all, but it doesn’t make a lot of difference to me. I simply wondered.”

“It isn’t just your cultural heritage. Don’t diminish yourself, Jake. I don’t find it cute.”

“Whoops, sorry!”

“We thought it was your possession of Jade, you know. An easy answer to the near-impossibility of discerning the trajectory of your fate. But you’re thoroughly extricated from her, and still a snarl of question-marks. It gives Dave a terrible headache to think about you for too long.”

This line of conversation is making you nervous all over again, and the bodice of your dress is feeling tight and itchy around your chest.

“Is that another thing I ought to apologise for?” you ask, hesitating.

She looks up at you appraisingly, the evening sunlight illuminating her dark eyes with a sort of purple-y duochrome.

“No. I would not have you self-efface for your exceptionality, though I don’t yet understand it myself.”

“I - if you speak to Jade,” you say, on sudden impulse. “Just, if it comes up, please, do you think you could smooth things over for us? I’ve been having the most terrible time, actually, thinking about her, having captured her all thieving-like, that stuff. If you want to know what kind of hangups I’ve got going into this thing, I feel kind of atrocious, actually, over all that. And I don’t even know where to _start_ apologising to her. After how much I’m sure I harmed her, even if she won’t… say it, you know. Not just me. Generations of other mes.”

“Gods don’t hurt, Jake. We don’t change. We hardly exist outside of far-reaching belief made manifest, with all attendant limitations. Core beliefs, for people as well as cultures, are not especially malleable things.”

“Well, that must be rather isolating,” you snort. “Existing in omniscient stasis like that. I guess if you _know_ everything and kind of _are_ everything, you can’t really… there’s nothing new to become, right? You’ve already ascended as high as you can go. It sounds like a lonely way to pass the millennia. And still no less compounded by being locked in a cellar for centuries and subjected to the torment of my horrible brain.”

“At times in my existence, I would have been inclined to share your sentiment,” she agrees. “It’s especially difficult for John, though I recognize that there is little love lost between you two. I can tell you, though, that far from representing a punishment, your companionship eased her loneliness. She speaks of you with great affection.”

You cringe a little at the praise, reaching up to rub the back of your neck, trying not to look too hangdog. Your fingertips follow the velvet over the curve of your throat, linger there.

“We’re verging thoroughly off track,” she adds. “A talent of yours. Tell me, where exactly do your uncertainties lie? What brought you to this particular nightmare?”

Straight to the point, then. You frown without really meaning to.

“I don’t know how much you or anyone can help,” you say. “I still have these dreams sometimes, obviously. It’s always _here_ , even when I’m awake. I close my eyes and I can still see it, clear as day. The palace, and the temple, I might as well have never left. Everything that… everything with me and Jane. And mother. It’s just always going to be there. And if I can’t excise it without… aggravating the gangrene, or whatever the hell Aradia was trying to explain, then…”

Cutting yourself off, you try to steady your breathing, recollect your dignity. Too easy to be forthcoming in a familiar space, and outside of reality, besides. When you’ve been thinking about this so much, ever since Vriska… you straighten your back, adjust your stance with precision, and it’s comfortable, the well-practiced resumption of your impeccable posture. You can’t quite bring yourself to take your hand away from your immulatio, though.

“I didn’t tell him, but I need them back,” you say, tugging at the velvet circlet. “I can still feel them, even when I’m awake. Like a phantom limb.”

“I see,” she replies, her expression inscrutable as her eyes trawl over your face, linger at yout hand. With some effort, you release the velvet choker and fully take your default posture, hands folded politely behind your back.

The setting sun washes her dark skin as though with pink-and-orange watercolors, highlighting even the most infinitesimal shifts in the set of her face. That doesn’t make her any easier to read, but does remind you of her peculiar, unearthly beauty. Of Kanaya, though they don’t look _alike_ , per se. Rose somehow conveys the same level of quiet, calculating intensity and checked power, despite the fact that she is a rather small woman, absent her tentacles.

She observes you in silence, and you don’t allow yourself to look away and hide your face, despite the near-acid burn of her gaze raking over you.

“I don’t actually understand, if I’m being entirely honest, which is usually my intention,” she corrects herself, after a long moment.

“Well, people keep saying they do,” you huff. “But I don’t think anyone does. I think it’s different, for me. Even if there were moments where it was a little horrible, like this last memory, I wasn’t being hauled off to some _fetid dungeon_ , I wasn’t bleeding out in the belly of a slave-ship. I never suffered, Rose, I have _never_ suffered! I never tried to fight it, not really. I loved mother. I truly did. I could’ve run away. I did, I mean, I snuck out just about every night, but only to come back here. If I hated her, if I were truly angry with her, if I didn’t like it, what they did to me, I would’ve _left_ , hocked a handful of trinkets and started fresh, learned an actual skill, which I’m clearly capable of doing, and found a decent life in the countryside or whatever.”

You’re definitely hyperventilating, but that doesn’t stop you, in the dream. Once you know it’s a dream, you can do almost anything you want. You’ve _always_ had the means to do anything, outside as well as inside the realm of fantasy. The little horse toy you broke alone could have bought you your freedom.

“But I liked it,” you say. “I enjoyed it. If Dirk, if Kanaya, if they all knew how much I _liked it_ , how much I wanted it, everything they did… I said _yes_. I ate what they gave me and I wore what they gave me and I did what they told me and I liked it, just like they said I would. Pretty bejeweled chains that don’t weigh you down or hurt you, that you can slip off any time, those aren’t _bonds_ , they’re just _necklaces_.”

The thing is, no matter how far you try to delve into the past and into your own abysmal psyche, you wouldn’t have _had_ to fight or claw your way out of anything. The temple doesn’t keep children against their will, no one is kept against their will. You just would’ve had to say ‘stop’. You would’ve had to hold your tongue rather than say ‘yes’, every time. You always had a way out, if you had wanted one.

People left, after all, people refused, no one beat them into submission, no one whipped their backs bloody, no one killed them. _People said ‘no’ to things_. Just not you. You returned to the temple every morning and you took what you were given and you were grateful for it. There’s no point trying to rewrite yourself into some tragic hero. Who have you ever been fighting but yourself, your own spineless, insipid self? No one even touched you until you came of age, but by then your wanting it was inevitable. You had learned your lessons well. Better than anyone.

It’s a dream, so you aren’t crying. Something is just seizing in your chest, something that is always there, despite the good and thorough job you’ve done of stamping it out. You don’t know what to call it, what it even might be.

“I don’t know if I believe you, or anyone really, when they say they like being with me just for the fact of it,” you tell her shakily, leaning against the forepaw of one of the enormous stone dogs for support. “It’s very easy to lie to yourself, you know. Just as easy to forget it was a lie at all.”

“Jake,” she says, gently, “I’ve had millennia to get to know myself. Self-assessment, in this regard, at least, is not a great shortfall of mine. I enjoy your company, and I love you, the way the truth loves the one who tells it. That is simply the way of Gods. You may not be ready to speak to Jade, but her feelings on the matter are entirely in keeping with my own. Our love is a forgone conclusion.”

You lean your forehead against the cool, smooth surface of the guardian statue. As a child, you played here so many times. You should have been safe, here.

“I _am_ sorry, you know,” you tell her, already feeling spent, exhausted by everything. “For all of it. All the stealing and lying and hurting people and everything. I’m sorry. I wish I could put a stop to it, somehow. But it seems I can’t. It’s just going to have to be something I live with.”

All this time, and you’d still beat Vriska half to death, you’d still manipulate Dirk, you’d still mistrust Kanaya and avoid Jade - loving them, caring about them, being cared for by them, it doesn’t make a lick of difference. You’re still the same person you were every damn time they sewed the immulatio on or cut them off or whatever the hell. You’ve been fighting so hard to change, all for barely an inch of fragile progress.

There’s been joy in it. Love, and family, and singing, and learning good things to balance out the heaps and heaps of nebulous bad, but that’s the core of all this nonsense, isn’t it? That your circumstances have changed, as radically as any circumstance _can_ change, but _you haven’t_. That, if it would help you succeed at this coming mission, you would steal Jade again a million times. The idea that she doesn’t hurt, that she would love you anyway, all it adds up to is an excuse in potentia. You would lie to any of them gladly. You love Dirk, you want to be his, you know it would hurt him not to be, but you could find a way to justify it, wouldn’t you? What’s coming, this endeavor, you’re already thinking of ways to sell your soul to pull it off.

“I’m sorry,” you say again, very quietly, and this time you aren’t talking to her.

“You’ve written, often, in that notebook of yours, trying to parse the love others profess for you into something digestible. Would you like to hear the internal rationale? It might be illuminating,” she suggests.

“Can you read Dirk’s mind?” you ask, surprised out of your mild stupor. “Oh, that would actually be very helpful if you can.”

“In a sense. If we look at love as a kind of intense fascination, enjoyment, kinship twined with admiration… I’m sure you’re aware of your own practice of casting aside what you don’t need and sinking your nails tenaciously into what you do. Your self-preservation instinct is remarkable for both its brutality and its adaptability,” she says, her tone, despite the seeming cruelty of her words, only warm and sincere, a candleflame dangerously close to singeing the tulle gathered at your wrists, though not quite yet. “I was a pirate, once, not unlike you, not at all unlike him. Survival is an art, and you are an artist. I admire you for it, could spend a human lifetime studying it in you, wanting it for myself. I hate that this objectively admirable tendency of yours has been made the means of your subjugation, more so every time I see you flourish through it. And you _have_ flourished, Jake.”

“Rose,” you start to protest almost immediately, “I don’t know if -”

“We can’t be anything but ourselves. Whatever the means by which you have arrived at who you are, now, you are your own, to do with what you will. I can tell you this much, with utter sincerity. Dirk’s love for you is not contingent on whatever particular performance you are enacting at any given moment, nor is mine. To merely marvel in fascination at a song, and not infinitely more so at the ingenuity of the singer, would be the highest form of ridiculousness.”

You sniffle pathetically. But _it’s a dream_. You don’t have to cry in dreams, so you don’t.

“He wants, so desperately, to understand you. You are a person of near-infinite fascination. Someone who has lived through what would have killed him. Make no mistake. Dirk would not have survived what you did. The chains you call a necklace would have choked him to death. You are a rare person, capable of remarkable things. As is he. Of course you would find both comfort and something to aspire to in him, and he in you.”

Her eyes light up with a deep purple fire, and she raises a delicate hand to lay it on your cheek.

“Does that make sense?”

“I…” you start to protest, trailing off. “I’ll have to think about it.”

Dirk sort of said the same thing, once. A long time ago. He phrased it less delicately, though you didn’t exactly make it easy for him to articulate himself, what with the sex-ing and then all the sobbing and conniptions. And you didn’t want to hear it, either. The sheer idea that someone could love you _for_ being an unrepentant sociopath still seems more than a little suspect. Particularly because you know that, for Dirk at least, there is a ‘too far’ you could take it, beyond which point he would struggle to resolve his love for you with his love for others.

He wasn’t upset with you for hurting Vriska, once the both of you came clean about it, but he would have been, if you’d killed her. And you can’t help but notice that he wasn’t exactly upset with _her_ for hurting you, either.

Lying to him, too, that’s an issue. He really hates it when you try to out-clever him, and eventually the frustration at himself for being duped would boil over into frustration with you, for doing the dupe-ing. It has before, and it likely will again, if you continue with your nonsense. That’s what you’ve been working so hard on. Making it palatable, making yourself digestible despite the acrid decay. Perhaps you _are_ going to have to come to terms with the rot that’s grown into your damned soul. It’s become load-bearing, at this point, the mouldering darkness.

You sigh.

“I guess so,” you say. “I don’t know what use that conclusion is to you. I’d double-cross you just as easily as anyone, wouldn’t I? Accepting love, on these terms, might as well just be another excuse to keep being a slippery friggin’ eel of a man.”

“Ah,” she replies, taking her hand from your face, tapping her nose with an odd sort of wink. “Of course. It’s a reliable trait of yours. You would put yourself before anything but that which you need to survive. Your Gods, your love, your friends - if you could live without it, you would.”

“Yes, I suppose,” you continue warily. “Unflattering, but… probably true. I can’t, though, is the thing. I can’t live without Dirk.”

“You could. You did it before, and you would do it again, if you had to,” she replies. “That’s not a conversation we need to have now, by any means. But once you thought you wouldn’t be able to live without your mother, didn’t you.”

Reluctantly, you nod along with her. It’s very weird to hear this all outside of your internal monologue, but she isn’t wrong.

“That doesn’t answer my question, though. You know all this stuff about me. So… why try to help me sort through my nonsense, then, and find contentment in my brazen degeneracy? How does any of this make me a better instrument of your will?”

“An excellent question. And one with an answer, too. There is trouble on the horizon, on a far larger scale than this single mission, important though it is for my beloved. So much is yet unclear to us. Both the revelation of your hidden country and the fact that our Sight could be thwarted by one man, on one Estate, renews previously-assuaged concerns about broader limitations of the Four Kings.”

You reach up, touching the cool spot on your cheek left behind by her now-absent palm. You didn’t feel a heartbeat, either. Huh. Is that the dream-setting, or simply a fact of Gods?

“I could have guessed that,” you admit. “Jane won’t easily let go of the thought of leveraging Godly power for her ends, and all this stuff about your… limits, and whatnot, it unsettles me, too. Others of my countrypeople surely knew the secret of the Star King’s use, and may be seeking a replacement.”

There are a million terrifying potentialities, and that’s just within a few milliseconds of mulling it over. How might Jane try to enact revenge against the Kings? How might an ambitious general attempt to subjugate them to win her favor? How might knowledge of the role of Godly potency in fueling massive societal growth influence the development of new systems of belief, the searching-out of weaker Gods inland, in any of the smaller cultures Aradia has described to you, to imprison and exploit?

“Correct. The stars, the seas, the winds, the forces that connect our world to the next, all auspicate something vast and terrible and nameless on the horizon, and we are rudderless, for the moment, before the new and many-headed threat posed by Aetria’s advances into the greater world. A factfinding mission, therefore, is due just as much as one for vengeance. What you’ve shared on the _Ascension_ has only increased my certainty in this speculation. We need to understand how we are being bested if we are to surmount the coming challenges.”

“But… my mission, as it were, is simply to serve as a distraction. It’s Kanaya and Vriska’s role, sleuthing out whatever artifact he’s using, destroying it or stealing or disabling it,” you protest weakly.

“I’m assigning you a secondary task. You’ll be in the best position to investigate Lord Ampora himself, to determine what he knows and how it may be used to aid your Kings.”

You laugh nervously. “And, ah… why me, then? Couldn’t you go through Kanaya for all of this?”

“She is quite single-minded in her intentions, which I respect entirely, but which makes her rather difficult to instrumentalize for data-gathering,” Rose replies, shrugging her lace-bound shoulders, and you have a moment of clarity.

“You’re a lot like me, aren’t you,” you say slowly.

“Please don’t interpret this as detracting, even marginally, from my love for her. She fascinates me endlessly. Her devotion to her cause is unfathomable to me, her acuity unparalleled, her beauty beyond expression. I love her, and I will marry her, when she is prepared to accept my hand. But my purposes are better accomplished through you.”

“Er, Rose, that’s all very well and good, but didn’t you just get done telling me what a snake I am?”

“Certainly. Find me something useful, and I will grant you a wish. I know you want more time, Jake. Everyone does. Dave would never agree to it, but I will simply have to overrule him, should you serve me well. If it’s immortality you want, it’s immortality you’ll have. For a person like you, that should prove an irresistible prize. One that would compel you to take full advantage of your faculties. A bargain impossible to refuse.”

The tightness of your immulatio becomes apparent as you swallow hard at the thought. The velvet shifts gently over the curve of your throat.

“There is no penalty for failure, of course, but the fact is, I don’t hand out immortality lightly. Succeed on Kanaya’s terms, and you will have a ship, a shop, a chest full of gold, whatever is within her considerable means. Succeed on my terms as well, and you may ask any one favor of me on top of that. As much time as you could ever want to determine who you truly are. You have my word, and my word is my covenant.”

Your mouth feels dry, questions crowding behind your soft palate. None immediately emerges as the _best_ response. She chuckles quietly at what must be a truly ridiculous face you’re making.

“I must admit,” you say stiltedly, “I had expected you to… ask me to protect her, or something. This is a bit of a surprise, being… you don’t mean to put us at odds, do you?”

“Kanaya can more than handle herself," she tells you simply. "The woman I love doesn't need me playing puppetmaster behind the scenes to survive. I would never presume to fight her battles for her. What kind of love would that be?"

"I don't know. Kind of a normal kind?" you say, shrugging. "Not that I'd be the person to judge what that is, heh."

"No, you wouldn't be. But I'm quite fond of you as you are. I won't be able to reach either of you, on the Estate grounds, but I trust that you won't let me down. Everyone has their price, Jake, and yours is one that I understand rather intimately."

"You... may just be right about that," you say weakly, no thought of protest left in your dream-body. Even thinking feels exhausting, at this point. She seems to register this, and her expression softens slightly.

“I usually am,” she agrees, delivering what should be a bone-shattering flick of her fingers to your solar plexus. "Now wake up."

Transitioning from the warm, bright, open-air palace to the cold, cramped, shadowy hold of the ship is jarring as you wake, panting and damp with sweat, in your hammock. Though it’s likely late afternoon, precious little in the way of light trickles in from overhead or through the portholes, blocked as they are by assorted treasures to be sold off. Rain batters the deck above you, and the boat rocks precipitously on an untamed sea. Vriska is sleeping in the hammock next to you, Kanaya staring up at the deck from the further-astern accommodation.

The shadows cast by the piles of Aetrian goods are grey and diaphanous, a second layer of darkness in the already gloomy hold. Among them, the crated candelabra you and Karkat tried to sell to Mituna back at the Court, an ornate grandfather clock lashed to a pile of boxes, an enormous ceremonial gold staff, a set of enameled ebony combs, a finely-wrought leather and goldwashed steel bridle, a mannequin that you’re pretty sure Equius selected and was reluctant to surrender, now ‘wearing’ the outfit you’re supposed to don upon making landfall. The light of a single lantern keeps them somewhat at bay, casting shadows of its own in yellowy relief against the walls.

Aradia is leaning against the clock, and she looks up from peeling a withered orange as you awaken.

Ah, right. It’s the last day before your projected arrival. You’re set to be boarded, soon, by one of the prowling Dersian warships. Dirk has Kanaya’s deeds of ownership and old identity, with the date and surname smudged out slightly, and the pendant to grant him safe passage. He’ll be the innocuous Captain Narayan until you’re past the blockade, with Roxy playing the diligent crewmate abovedeck and Aradia waiting in reserve to bring up a crate of cargo for tax-slash-bribe purposes.

All this to keep you, clearly Aetrian, and the two most distinctive crewmates with bounties on their heads hidden in the hold, playing the part of the sleeping crew. Hopefully above notice, given the chest of jewelry you plan to be forking over.

You suppose the boarding itself hasn’t happened yet, as Aradia lays nervously in wait, with the ship still barreling forwards under the Wind and Sea Kings’ guidance, no doubt steadied by their influence as well.

She notices as you sit up, taking in your demeanor even from a distance, and scoots over with the lantern to continue her meticulous sectioning-off of orange pieces and removal of seeds from your hammockside.

“No boarding, yet?” you say, grateful for the company, settling back against your pillow, which damp with sweat but still a comfort.

“Not for a while. He’ll signal when he catches sight of the ship, though visibility is pretty bad right now,” she says, offering you an orange section on the tip of one of her knives. You pluck it off between two fingers and eat it happily. On the older side, gone a little sour with the trip, but still good.

“Thank you,” you say politely, and she smiles through her clear discomfort with the circumstances. You’ve all been shoved in the hold for hours, so as not to tip any observing vessel off to anything sketchy going on by scrambling belowdeck as they approach. You must have drifted off.

“You alright?” she asks, checking your temperature with the back of her hand. “You’re running kinda warm.”

“Just a King-visit in my sleep,” you tell her. “Got a little intense, I suppose.”

“Ooh, spill, what’d they say?”

“It was the Sea King,” you say, sighing deeply. “Dire warnings, cryptic nonsense, a side-quest of sorts that I don’t even know where to start on. I don’t really want to talk about it. I’ve been kind of wound up about everything, I think, and it sort of came to a head in the form of a recurring nightmare, and them… bam. King.”

“The drowning one?” she suggests brightly, and you have to laugh. Aradia is an almost scarily good listener, and she never seems to forget what she hears, either.

“Gosh, I’ve got to stop telling you this stuff! No. I guess it’s not quite _that_ recurring. Just being back at the palace, right about when things got… one of the few times I can really say was not good. Leaving home for the first time.”

“I have those, too,” she says. “Memory-dreams are weirdly awful, huh?”

“You can say that again.”

In lieu of actually repeating herself, she offers you another orange section.

“Jane was there, for the first part. I think I’m worried about her,” you say. “In the abstract, I mean. In a lot of ways? It’s just funny to remember that she was a child, too, when all of this was going on. And I’m sure she’s in over her head, wherever she is. She and I have that same tendency. I wonder if anyone is even _trying_ to help her.”

“Look, tensions always rise before… like, when a prize is in sight and we’re just twiddling our thumbs until we can blow it up!” she explains, smiling slightly. “Even now. I couldn’t sleep if I tried. Everything just… comes right back. As long as you don’t let it freak you out too much, it can actually be a really good time to process, since you’re about to be super _on_ , twenty-four-seven, for the mission. It’ll be a great distraction!”

“I sure hope so,” you say, a little relieved to be reminded of it. True, it’s the source of some of the tension. Going back to your roots. Remembering that who you were, _exactly_ how you were, all of that is still living in you.

“Hey, and when it’s all over, the whole world is your oyster! You’re definitely teaching me how to do an Aetrian burial, okay? But apart from that… I bet Dirk would follow you anywhere. And so would the rest of the crew, honestly. Anywhere you want to go, anything you want to do. Give yourself something nice to think about. There’s still lots of ships to pillage, and world to burn, and skulls to enamel! This isn’t the end-all-be-all, okay? Let it wind you up just enough to motivate you, but remember the other stuff.”

You smile, taking another orange bit from her. And all the time in the world in which to do it, maybe. Infinite opportunities to forget the sunlit halls of the palace, the temple air heavy with incense, and everything that happened back there.

“Perhaps the _Diamond_ could use a ship cat,” you say, grateful for the innocuous line of thought, after all that heavy… everything. “That’s kind of the only thing I think I’m missing, here. I’m sure we’ll all be ready for some resting and revelry and whatnot once the deed is done, but I’ve really come to like it, this sailing stuff. I want to keep learning with you all.”

If that’s what you’re doing it for, it’s hardly even self-motivated, right? You’ll be so much more useful to the crew, with experience under your belt, with the Sea-King-sponsored opportunity to catch up with them all.

“Got over the Vriskaphobia?” she suggests, as you grin in earnest and run your hand over the near-fully-healed bruises that only barely shadow your face. Aradia has been helping you treat them with a few salves to accelerate the healing, and they’re practically invisible, now. “The trick is, she’s not actually scary. Like, she might actually be the least scary person alive, once you know how to handle her.”

“Shut up,” Vriska grumbles from the next hammock.

Her head pokes up over the edge to deliver a rather fearsome one-eyed glare in Aradia’s direction. She retaliates by flicking a piece of orange peel into Vriska’s hair, absolutely unperturbed. It’s all so very normal, so reassuring.

Beating up Vriska, Aradia told you, with a slightly-too-sincere wink and a nudge, is basically a rite of passage when it comes to becoming her sort-of-friend. Attempted murder is supposedly her love language. Maybe that’s true. Your nightmare, and all of your hesitations, are starting to feel much further away, if not entirely gone.

Accepting another orange section, you let yourself daydream in earnest. About sailing, about nights of laughter and song and cards and braised halibut, about your crew, _your crew_ , your friends. About Dirk more than any of them, of course. The bed you share. How much you miss waking up next to him, tangled in his arms. How many of those mornings you could have in your future.

Given enough time, you could even find a way to tell him about it. Everything you don’t yet have the words for, can’t make sense of yourself, let alone in such a way that you could explain it to him, everything that’s happened to make you how you are.

It would be better, if it weren’t a secret. You could deserve his trust someday. Maybe. A thought for later, not for the eve of your descent on the Ampora Estate.

You stretch in your hammock, feeling satisfied if not at peace. There’s still a lot to do. You were kind of hoping that _you_ would get to be the ambassador for the boarding, though the whole ‘Aetrian invasion of Derse’ thing kind of put a damper on that opportunity to practice your character. What a bummer!

For all your line of thought has soothed you, though, Aradia is back to picking tensely at the last orange section, meticulously scraping off every little piece of pith and string.

“Are you looking forward to anything, when this is over with?” you ask, rolling over on your shoulder, the better to watch her work.

“I go where the _Diamond_ goes,” she says, finally tossing away the debris and popping the orange slice into her mouth, chewing thoughtfully. “But I talked to the Star King myself, back when she visited. She’s planning to do a tour of the seas, now that she’s back, and she miiiiight want a guide or two along? So if we do have a break before Vriska comes up with our next prize, Sollux and I have an escort mission lined up.”

She waggles her eyebrows as she says this, and you dissolve into stifled laughter. “Oh, I love it! The two of you better treat her right, you hear me? I mean, I don’t have a shadow of a doubt that you will, but… ah, that’s really lovely.”

“Yeah,” she agrees. “It’s kind of ridiculous, just how much of the world I _haven’t_ seen. And she sees _all of it_. Beaches made of perfectly round stones that sound like they’re breathing when the tide comes in. Sharks twice as long as this ship. An island that’s always covered by mist because of an enormous waterfall. And people, also, doing people-things. Aetria’s on my list, too.”

“I’ve been tightfisted about the language lessons,” you observe. “I promise, that’s not deliberate, it’s just that Dirk is relentless. He’s really excellent at the business, too! The man is just chock full of talents. You’d be welcome to sit in on instructions the way back to the Court. I’m sure he’d adore having another conversational partner to badger.”

“I’m going to fill a bathtub with crowns and fucking swim in it,” Vriska announces, her voice gravelly with interrupted sleep. “That’s literally my only plan.”

You fall back down in your hammock with another short laugh, your face no longer clammy with nightmare-sweat, your heart adequately warmed. No signal, yet, but Kanaya did express conviction that the Dersian blockade, particularly given the war effort, would be active. Without any more orange to eat, Aradia begins to shred the remainder of the orange peel, which you can smell as much as you can hear. It cuts through the salt and damp rather pleasantly.

Things have a way of falling into place, you decide. And of course, the Sea King is correct. She can trust you to help them along in her preferred direction. Hell, you would probably have been just as eager to do as she asked if there wasn’t a massive reward at the end of the race! Probably. Heh.

The timeline of the actual endeavor is as follows. After being boarded at some point in the afternoon or evening, the _Ascension_ will arrive at the Estate under the cover of night, dock, and you will disembark from the vessel with Dirk, Roxy, and a few crates of treasure in tow. They’re to pose as your recently-acquired servants, neither of whom speak especially much Common, alas. In your employ in exchange for their freedom upon reaching Aetria. Dirk and Roxy, you’ve learned, over the course of various strategy meetings, have spent an almost hilarious amount of time coming up with complicated backstories for their characters, who are fraternal twins, escaped a tragic home life to join a circus, were captured by unscrupulous slave-merchants in the seaside city of Lopan, and are both completely and utterly in love with you, but in secret.

You think that’s very nice of those imaginary people!

Upon gaining entry to the fortified portion of the Estate, you will come up with a ruse to allow at least one of them to slip away. One of them must draw your bath, one of them must retrieve some misplaced crate of jewels, yada yada whatever whatever. At a predetermined rendezvous point, the entry of Vriska and Kanaya to the estate will be facilitated by a gate propped open or otherwise left near-invisibly ajar, and your Dirk-or-Roxy will return to your company with no one the wiser.

If caught, well, obviously they were merely trying to escape into the countryside, as captive people are reasonably wont to do, and you will, of course, have sympathy for their straits, but insist that they remain with you until the terms of your agreement are fulfilled, and the show will go on. Layers of subterfuge within layers of subterfuge, wheels within wheels!

Kanaya and Vriska will skulk about by a variety of means. The estate contains a network of tunnels for the movement of resources in the iced-over winter months, in fierce storms and whatnot, and a massive number of external buildings to the main body of the castle as well as a veritable web of secret passageways within the primary residence. They are somewhat banking on determining the origin of Dualscar’s obfuscation from the Dead King’s Sight within a day or two, but now you have your own independent objective to help this process along, so you will do your best to collect information about his religious practices and anything that seems out of the ordinary to your particular Aetrian-stuff-knowing sensibilities.

As such, the actual amount of time that you will need to keep up the distraction remains up in the air. Kanaya is apologetic about this ambiguity; the Estate is enormous, and it’s been decades since her maps were updated. Even from her memory, there were a million hidey-holes in which a talisman of great importance might be sequestered. Sprawling arrays of barracks, for different sorts of workers, granaries and stables and workshops, practically a city inside of the fortified outer walls.

So you were already planning to stall for as long as it takes, waffle about indecisively, keep the bulk of the desirable goods on the ship. Aradia will remain on the _Ascension_ throughout all of this, playing the role of the dastardly pirate employed to escort you across the seas, to watch over the remaining trinkets with God-killing weapons of her own at the ready and to attend to your means for making a hasty getaway, and thus guard your leverage to avoid being strongarmed into concluding things prematurely and sailing off, leaving Vriska and Kanaya behind.

As long as you’ve still got deals to be made and treasures to be sold, you can overstay your welcome nigh-indefinitely, no tricks involved. This part has been much discussed. You want horses! Fine horses. One of every color! You want a ship that can transport the horses, and horsekeepers to accompany you on the ship, and you want the ship to be gilded, and to have cloth-of-gold sails, and for every member of the crew to be fluent in Aetrian. You will accept no substitutes, but perhaps you will be negotiated down from your demands, slowly! He will just have to fuck around and find out.

There are contingencies built into the contingencies, deceits within deceits, gears within gears. Once both Dirk and Kanaya are set to a problem, there is really no stopping the planning process from spiraling into overspecification. She has an answer to every question he asks, and he has an alternative and a ten-minute argument over logistics for every response she furnishes. It is a little exhausting, to be honest, but you’re grateful for it in hindsight. The exhaustive preparation has left you with absolutely no loose ends, no hypothetical stone of the damned Estate left unturned.

Yes, to walk in with any sense of trepidation is patently absurd. You were born for this. And the Sea King is probably being a little melodramatic about the stakes, but you’ll take your twin objectives very seriously nonetheless. By the time this trial is completed, you’ll have ol’ Dualscar singing his secrets like a horny caged canary, and some of it will surely be useful for her purposes.

The ship creaks, tossed by a particularly powerful wave. In the intervening period before the boarding, the Sea King and Wind King have largely left the _Ascension_ on its own, so as not to provoke suspicion of supernatural involvement. Aradia grits her teeth as the lantern flickers, sputters low.

Absurd indeed. While you’ll be off in the manor, supping on fine dinners and causing a mild ruckus, protected by Dirk and Roxy both, in the lap of Dersian luxury, she’ll be stuck on the ship. Likely the last place she wants to be for too long. Moored on the Estate’s grounds, so no Kings to keep her company. As many times as she’s reassured you that she’s happy to play this particular role - knowing full well that the alternative is leaving _Vriska_ in charge of the ship, as though she could avoid rushing in and Participating at the slightest provocation - you still feel kind of horrible. Didn’t imagine you’d be leaving her in the dark belly of the boat.

“Hey,” you stage whisper. “About those nerves. If we haven’t been signaled yet, d’you think we could get a song going? I’ve been having nightmares, as I said, I know it’s over nothing, but I don’t exactly want to fall back asleep in earnest, if you’d be willing to…”

You trail off, waving a hand about vaguely but hopefully.

“Only if Vriska helps,” she replies, her smile barely more than a thin line.

Vriska lets out a series of phenomenally unconvincing fake snores until you elbow her ‘awake’.

“I hate you both,” she grumbles.

You glance over at Kanaya, her eyelashes stilled in repose. It should be impossible to sleep gracefully in one of these hammocks. She’s a smidge taller than you, after all, and you basically have to curl up to get comfy, or snuggle in on top of Dirk if you have the option. Her hands are folded delicately across her stomach, over the place where Eridan’s harpoon exposed the gnarled black scar tissue, almost protectively. She hasn’t had much of a chance to rest, owed slightly to the fact that she doesn’t much like to surrender the wheel, even to actual crew members with steering experience.

Hopefully, this won’t bother her.

“Just a single solitary little song,” you prod, your tone cajoling. “What’s the harm in raising our spirits a bit, hm?”

Aradia mimes setting her guitar on her lap - both of your instruments are tucked away safely against the rolling and tossing of the storm - and helpfully pretends to strum it, humming a starting note.

“Come on, you definitely know this one,” she prompts, then jumps right in.

[[Tune: Tell God and the Devil]](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4QlTmKAXUu4)

_We’re bound for certain peril that waits for us ahead_  
_The course is far from easy but we chose the path we tread_  
_So get down to the cannons, put your smallarm on your hip_  
_Someday we’ll give our lives, we know, for captain, Kings, or ship_

_But while the sail may tear and ice with freezing spray_  
_I swear the Wind King won’t be taking us today_

_There’s havoc to be wrought, my friends, and who but us to wreck?_  
_The mast tilts like a pendulum and swings above the deck_  
_We tail a mighty galleon, its flag the Dersian crown_  
_A storm won’t be what kills us, boys, let’s hunt the fucker down!_

_While the waves may drag us miles from the bay_  
_I swear the Sea King won’t be taking us today_

_The clouds hang black and heavy, a dark pall overhead_  
_To lose sight of the ship we chase would surely be our death_  
_Near lost beneath a shrouded sky, no stars to guide us home_  
_Hold fast to crew and faith my friends, no pirate dies alone_

_Although the skies themselves may vanish in the grey_  
_I swear the Star King won’t be taking us today_

_There’s treasure to be found here, the reason why we came_  
_We’ll hear no cries for mercy when there’s riches to be claimed_  
_So tie the lines down steady and get the cannons aimed_  
_On sails or on the guns, my friends, we’re sure to win this game_

_It’s a simple oath, but it’s the one we pray_  
_I swear the Dead King won’t be seeing us today_

_While in the end to him our lives we’ll gladly pay_  
_On all the Gods, he’ll have to wait - he’ll have to wait another day_

You do, as a matter of fact, know this one. Vriska, grudgingly, does as well. You forget what a lovely voice she has, sometimes. By the final chorus, though, Kanaya is awake, watching impassively. Not like any of you were quiet about it; it’s not a _quiet_ kind of song.

“Thank you,” you murmur down to Aradia. “That’s a good one.”

“Yeah,” she agrees, smiling slightly. “Seriously, you have nothing to be tense about. We’ve got you, no matter what.”

“And I you, as much as I can make a promise like that,” you sigh, wishing it could be a little more simple.

Three sharp raps sound against the entryway to the hold; you freeze in place before you realize what it means. Aradia nods grimly; the next knock will prompt her to carry up the Bribery Crate. The only faces that the boarding crew interacts with will be from recognizably Dersian, and nondescript enough to avoid too much notice, with Dirk in your big overcoat and a set of gloves. Bearing the Ampora sigil, presumably not yet known to have any association with the Aetrian invasion. And who would want to be out for long, in the storm?

You force your breathing to calm. Nothing you can do. Just wait, just wait.

It’s a treacherously long time before you hear additional boots on the deck, the low sound of voices calling over the wind and rain. You can imagine it vividly enough. Dirk would make a good captain. He has an easy sense of authority to him, positively embodies what you’ve learned through your etiquette lessons and novel readings is considered quintessential Dersian masculinity. It’s not _quite_ a full one-eighty from Aetrian convention, but it’s damn close to the diametric opposite of what you grew up with, that’s for certain.

At least in the upper echelons, the Aetrian view on gender is more of an elaborate dance than anything. Certain dances come easier to people who adhere to their biologically prescribed roles - conventional wisdom holds that men are more predisposed to avaricious flights of fancy and irrationality, more delicate of constitution and prone to sickness and injury and early death than women. But there are all sorts of things one can do to alter their aesthetic, and any litgamella worth their salt knows there’s no real difference, in the end. Bodies are bodies, and the rules of any one tend to translate well to the rules of another.

You can’t even start to tell the bones apart more-or-less until coming of age. Right around thirteen, after all, is when things often start to go haywire for bodies. And that’s when you’re formally named, too, so there’s plenty of time to make chemical adjustments or just forestall the choice altogether. You’ve had a few of those yourself, though ‘litgamella’ is a separate axis entirely to gender, a wholly different dance to different music.

Derse’s view on the whole thing seems rather uninspired and a little dull in comparison. At least pirates are rather less inclined towards bizarre and ironclad characterization of inborn traits and particular configurations of flesh as broadly and universally definitive! And Dirk, whatever dance he is doing up there to lend credence to his dude-ly right to command the vessel, is most assuredly doing a splendid one. He really is something.

Cozying up in the hammock all over again, you sigh, missing him badly. Quite pathetic, given you’ve just been nap-nightmaring and otherwise singing a scant few yards away from the fellow in question, but. Well. You can’t help it. You’re very attached.

All the better, then, that he and Roxy will be your coterie of… indentured servants, as it were, sort of. There hasn’t been a moment properly _alone_ on the ship, and you’re not some lecherous loose-liver who can’t keep his hands to himself. You have proved so conclusively that your giving in to wanting him the night before you departed the Court wasn’t a true backslide, that you love much, much more than fucking him, that you _can_ restrain your baser urges and act like less of a damned deviant by his particular standards.

You have a whole page in your notebook of good reasons to love him. A _whole page_ , and your handwriting is very tidy and neat, so that’s saying a lot!

More boot steps, more voices. The rain seems to have stopped a while back, the wind still audible from within the hold, the sea still rough. Aradia carts up the agreed-upon crate, and you hold your breath until she returns. Waiting for something to go wrong? You aren’t sure.

It doesn’t, though. Doesn’t go wrong at all. There’s a nudge against the hull, almost like a particularly powerful wave, sending reverberations through that are palpable even in your hammock, and makes Aradia start like she’s been burned. Several minutes pass as the boarding dinghy leaves for the warship, presumably disappears from sight.

A knock sounds again, and Roxy’s face, a little wind-swept and rain-damp, appears, and it’s over.

You clamber up after Aradia to see the sky, clouded-over as it is, and throw yourself into Dirk’s arms. He’s chilly, and his lips taste like rain and salt, but you’re grateful for it. Your clothes are quickly dampened, but you’ll be changing soon, anyway.

Kanaya and Vriska follow you up to the deck.

“All went well, I would imagine?” Kanaya asks, retaking the various papers and the pendant from Dirk, which briefly forces you to release him, laughing, from your determined embrace.

“Yeah. Hook, line, and sinker,” he agrees, picking you back up and kissing you again, warmer, now.

“That took longer than I expected,” she continues. Indeed, its pitch dark out, and not only because of the rain. If the projections are correct, you won’t have more than a few hours before making landfall. It’s hard to tell the time, with the stars obscured by clouds. You focus, instead, on Dirk’s warmth, his heartbeat, when you cup his face in your palm.

Kanaya retakes the wheel, frowning down at a compass and across the night-black sea, to the distant mountain range, nigh-invisible in the dark. The moon overhead is a waxing gibbous, so there’s some small distinction to be made between the horizon and the clouds, which will have to suffice.

“Everything go alright down there?” Dirk asks, his attention on you, now, rubbing your back reassuringly.

“Would it be too clingy to say that I missed you?” you suggest, lifting up your head as Roxy sidles in after relinquishing the wheel to shoulder-check you in greeting.

“Hey, me ‘n Dirk, we’re gonna be on your ass the entire time you’re in there,” she insists, scootching in under your arm like a supportive crutch. “Be as clingy as you want. Go nuts! When in Prospit…”

“...do as the Prospitians do,” Dirk finishes, leaning against your opposite shoulder with an air of great certainty. “Come on, odds are you’re going to be suffering from a _severe_ case of Dirk-and-Roxy-fatigue by the end of this shit. We’re not leaving you alone to so much as take a piss.”

“Ah, after a week and a half on a ship of this size, that won’t be too much of an adjustment,” you chuckle, already feeling the last of your unaccountable tension slipping out of your shoulders. How hard can any of this be? It’s the simplest thing there is. Good and evil. A mission to retrieve secrets from a horrible old man that will serve the Gods you love, and who love you, in their way.

If you aren’t cut out for _this_ , you aren’t cut out for piracy, period. You give Roxy’s shoulder a squeeze and budge over to resume kissing Dirk.

“Gettin’ pretty friendly, there,” he notes, his voice low and husky.

“Can I help it if I’m devastatingly aroused by your brief fling with captain-ly authority?” you parry.

“Well, get ready for a role reversal, ‘cause it’s about to get weird and 24/7 master-slave-y all up in this bitch,” he replies, and you stop mouthing at his jaw to laugh at the sheer thought of it.

“I’m sorry in advance,” you tell Dirk, gesturing Roxy closer to ensure that she is in on your preemptive apology. “I will probably be horrible.”

“Fell in love with your horrible ass once,” Dirk reminds you, squeezing you a little tighter.

“Don’t sweat it too much,” Roxy agrees. “We’ll be having fun, I guarantee it! What’s the matter with feeding you grapes and carrying you around on our shoulders or whatever? Between friends? Between gamers?”

“You’re both far too good to me,” you sigh. “It may be hard to give it up, actually, once this is over.”

“Don’t get too used to me being all sexy serving girl,” Roxy snorts. “I’m sexy all the time, obviously, but maid-y shit is gonna be a new one, even for me. Speaking of which, should we start gettin’ all fancied up?”

“Sure, probably!” you agree. “I’ll have to go last, I think, mine’s the most complicated to get right, I’ll need Kanaya’s help with it.”

Not even a lie. Roxy, satisfied, slips belowdeck, dragging Vriska with her, presumably for emotional support. You snuggle up against the coat, finding that you like it much, much better when Dirk is wearing it, even though the moist wool smells like a wet sheep.

“You sure you’re okay?” he says, back to petting your hair.

“The very okayest!” you affirm. “Just incredibly okay. And I mean that, I was a little wound up, but I had a really pleasant talk with Aradia, and we sang a song, and I think… I don’t know, you all have a way of making me feel like a person. Like a real human person. It has been such a lovely trip, on sum.”

“Good.” He kisses the top of your head. “You _are_ a person. You’re my person. This is gonna go smoother than an oiled-up infant down a slip-and-slide, you hear me? I speak it into existence. Knock on wood.”

Rapping his knuckles smartly against the gunwale, he resumes embracing you, much to your delight.

“It is,” you say. “I’m going to make sure of that.”

He gives you another head kiss. You would very much like to fluff up like a self-satisfied nesting bird in his arms. It’s going to be so strange, ordering him around in earnest. But you can adapt to anything, of course. The Sea King was right about that much. No brutal old slaver is going to be getting the best of you. No way, no how. Not with Dirk and Roxy to back you up. Not with everything you’ve ever dreamed of explicitly on the line.

In a way, it’s like a second chance. To go through the whole business again, and do it right. To know, this time, exactly what is right and what is wrong, and to have a go at throwing your weight around the way you never did in the palace or the temple. A re-enactment that ends with the bad guy dead and the good guy (which is you, without a shadow of a doubt) triumphant.

What a nice idea, truly being the protagonist, for once. You’re not sure you’ve ever really been that, before. Not in your own stories.

Roxy reappears in a neat Dersian-style gown, procured through Aradia’s counsel, the aesthetic of a picture-perfect serving-maid in simple long sleeves, warm and functional and ready to wait on you hand and foot. Dirk gives you a last stroke between your shoulderblades and swaps out with her. You’re excited, to have him all dressed up and at your beck and call. Is it bad, that such a thing excites you? Probably. You don’t think he’ll mind all that much. Heh.

Standing beside Roxy in silence, you watch the mountains loom closer, craggy cliffs and bleak moors sprawling out before you. Something glimmers in the distance, and not only with the light of the moon.

You squint out; it’s still too far away to resolve as more than a silvery pinprick on the horizon.

Soon. No putting it off anymore. No fresh adventures or opportunities for last-minute personal growth to sidetrack you. The Gods themselves could hardly stop you from reaching your destination. You’re sure that’s it, the only _anything_ resembling a settlement anywhere nearby.

“Hey, you’re up,” Dirk calls, reemerging in fitted trousers and a somewhat dull but warm-looking overshirt, tidied up considerably, his hair wet from washing-out with fresh water and his face clean, gleaming in the diffuse moonlight. “I can take the wheel while you prep him?” he offers to Kanaya.

“Thank you,” she replies, ushering you over. “We have our work cut out for us.”

You tail her back down into the hold. The dress-form, garbed in your landing outfit, looms forebodingly beside the other treasures. She closes the latch behind you.

“Unless you would prefer privacy when you wash up,” she begins, but you’re already stripping down, entirely mentally prepared for this, and also not wanting to dwell on whether she might recognize that something has changed about your attitude, somehow, that the Sea King might have divulged something about you in one of her dreams, maybe, something like that.

“Oh, no, I’ve got no reservations about who sees what, you know me,” you laugh, scrubbing off with the inside of your deck shirt, wet with fresh water from one of the barrels.

“About as well as one can get to know someone in two weeks,” she agrees mildly. “Come along, I’ll ready the - immulatio, is that it?”

“Ee-mu-la-chio,” you correct her with a flourish, drying off and replacing your underclothes with a pair from a trunk of garments meant to supply you, Dirk, and Roxy. “Not that it matters all that much. Sew me in, then!”

“Doesn’t it? It seemed to matter quite a lot, before,” she asks carefully, closing the trunk, sitting you down beside her, velvet in one hand, needle and thread in another.

It’s awfully intimate, the way she gently loops the cloth around your neck, her focus momentarily absolute and directed to her task as you hold very, very still. The needle never so much as grazes you. She keeps you every bit as steady as you keep yourself, and you feel the choker go tight as she pulls the stitches taut and ties her work off invisibly.

Only once it’s done do you realize that you have been holding your breath.

“Perhaps,” you say. “Perhaps it all matters, or nothing matters. I’ve heard quite a few perspectives on… everything. And I think that, regardless, so long as I focus on the task at hand with all the willpower I can muster, I’ll be fine.”

“Good,” she says, kneeling before you. “Foot, please.”

The process continues in much the same way, though now you can watch it as the tiny stitches close the fabric bonds in place. Not really bonds. Barely more than jewelry. Merely a fact of you, and not one you can easily forget just yet. Not _yet_. All things in good time.

Your other foot follows, and as Kanaya works, you start getting the fine red satin shirt on, knowing you’ll need help with the back buttons, but wanting to make some progress of your own, not to rely on her too much.

“How do you want to kill him?” you finally ask, breaking the silence. “Is there a specific way? I’m just curious, you don’t have to tell me if you don’t want to.”

“ _Conclusively_ , this time, given the failure of my previous venture,” she replies, her tone wry. “It is my intention that everyone on the Estate will be well aware of it, when he dies. No one more so than he himself. You may think me cruel for what you will likely see and hear me do. But I have learned to be thorough when killing him.”

“I don’t know. I’d imagine most anything you do will be eminently justified,” you say, as she finishes the final closing stitch and slices through the tail of thread left behind with a tiny pair of gold scissors.

“I’ve imagined it so many times,” she sighs. “At this point, it may as well be a formality. But an important one, nonetheless.”

“Closure.”

“Yes.”

She gestures that you should stand and turn about, and you do so, putting on your trousers and readying the cape and doublet as she finishes with your buttons. You fiddle with your hair as she applies the finishing touches, replace your glasses on the bridge of your nose, buckle on a sword-belt that will bear a coelotrovic steel sabre and a fine revolver loaded with the same black-steel bullets.

“Are you ready?” she suggests.

Among the cargo is a rather splendid bejeweled mirror, which reminds you of a smaller version of the one hanging in your chambers, back at home. She leads you to it, and you take a moment to really look at yourself, doing a double-take in the process. Perfectly fitted, now, the outfit is almost spectacularly dashing. You look nothing like yourself. Though it hugs the contours of your body, the red satin shirt doesn’t force your waist in, allows you to breathe. The long black cape, pinned in place with what practically amounts to a gold broach, broadens your shoulders even further than muscle gained through sword fighting practice and deck work in the last few days already have.

You’re no longer so pale as to be nearly translucent. The jewelry in your face doesn’t stand out quite so starkly against a smattering of freckles, sun damage from all the exposure you’ve been getting. You’re not… unattractive, for all you’ve thoroughly departed from any kind of Aetrian standard, whether for a man or for a litgamella. You’re almost imposing. The kind of person someone might fear, for a second, before you opened your mouth and began to speak.

Huh.

“Thank you,” you say quietly, shifting aside the cape to get a better look at your immulatio. The anklets are currently concealed by a pair of patent leather knee-high riding boots, but you’re sure you’ll have ample time to show those off when you’re not making a first impression. “It’s an incredible transformation.”

“I want you to have every advantage in this endeavor,” she tells you simply. “You look the part.”

“Really, Kanaya, thank you. For all of this,” you say. “I won’t let you down.”

“Of course you won’t,” she agrees, patting your upper arm through the fabric of your cape. “You ought to let the others have a look. They’ll need to get the fawning out of their system before we disembark.”

“Haha, you don’t have to tell me twice.”

“And I need to change as well, Jake, so up you go,” she reminds you. “I’ll begin carrying up the goods to be brought ashore when I’m done. It will be less than an hour, now.”

Less than an hour. Your breath feels odd in your chest as you climb back up to deck. The promised fawning does very much occur, but you don’t enjoy it as much as you might, your gaze drawn to the growing spot of white luminescence in the distance. No escaping it, now. Not that you would want to, right?

So many threads of fate have brought you here, so many disparate motives and experiences and - and people, too. What can you do, then, but what you’ve always done?

You stand at the prow, cape billowing somewhat majestically behind you, and steel yourself to put on one hell of a show.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Updates should be fairly quick from here on out. Look for the next within the week. If you feel inclined, there is now [a non-sea-shanty playlist](https://open.spotify.com/playlist/6J14ExPEogphzZilanVav4?si=3yhpUCpCRx6AnGmLQQ0OzQ) attached to this fic.


	15. The Imperial Dirge [Instrumental] (or, Prince’s Gambit Accepted)

Perhaps you’re imagining it, the sudden sense of absence when you pass the threshold of the Kings’ influence. Like an umbilical cord severed. For an instant, you’re grasped by a fleeting wrongness. The stars, as they did when passing the boundary into Aetria on the _Diamond_ , flicker into something unparseably different. It’s a vanishing frisson of shifting reality, but no less palpable as it passes through you.

You’re alone, now, all of you. Truly alone. You wonder what your dreams will look like, here.

The Ampora Estate is located directly beside the mouth of a vast, slow-moving river, fueled by the inland icemelt of a thousand Dersian mountain peaks. It’s ensconced from your seaside mode of approach by hulking, glacier-carved black stone cliffs. What little you can make out, as the _Ascension_ draws nearer, is fairly far inland, buildings rising like low-set grey headstones from the windswept moors. A distant wall guards the portion of the Estate not shielded by the hostile geography; a set of docks upriver are entirely empty, but increasingly visible, illuminated by a single lantern, weak yellow light spilling out over the night-black water of the river.

Kanaya and Vriska are tucked safely belowdeck. Aradia steers the craft up against the current. The wind isn’t totally quiet, fills the sail enough to propel the craft, but the night air is cold, wet with dissipating fog, and relatively placid after the brutal storm.

The light that you could see, even from a truly massive distance, appears to be burning in the windows of a hulking castle within the second, more fortified inner wall. Despite the hour, the enormous building is very much awake, the rough-hewn texture of the parapets cast in an odd kind of silhouette by its radiance.

Dirk and Roxy flank you at the prow in silence. It’s an oddly disarming sight. You don’t think you’ve ever seen lamplight quite so silver, though they don’t comment on the strangeness, just stand beside you like pillars.

“S’pose the Lord of the house is expecting our arrival,” you suggest casually.

It’s going to be a real effort, resisting the temptation to discuss the actual endeavor. That said, you’re accustomed to performing 24/7, assuming that you’re being observed even in the absence of eyes. After all, you learned early on that it had always been a function of the temple to gather information, and the same was true of your bedchamber back at home. Someone was always listening. Secrets are too valuable not to be heard, for all you might have been an unreliable mouthpiece. Hollow walls, hidden passageways, it’s rather an obvious hazard, and Kanaya has been quite open about the potential risk.

So you’ll simply have to do your best, won’t you? It was easier at home, when there was only one well-developed character to inhabit, when the front you were putting up was barely even a mask. More a layer of facepaint, at most. It wasn’t a stretch, really, that you might adore them as you already were.

You’re not the prince you’ll be pretending to be, though. You’re no one’s master, hardly even your own. The lie is structural, fundamental, and vitally important to uphold. You have necromantically revived the atrophying past-self you left in Aetria, when first you struck out on your own with the Star King in tow. It’s one thing to wear a full face of makeup, another to puppeteer the corpse you’ve been dragging along for half a year, to live as him again.

Of course, you can manage it. You’ve juggled more challenging lies before, and managed to maintain them for far longer than this could conceivably take. It’s hardly even novel. The puppet you’re puppeting is really the same one you’re manipulating when you sigh, as yourself, and lean your weight against the gunwale, exhaling a cloud of condensation on the breeze.

Aradia calls for Dirk and Roxy to get on the sail, and then you’re alone, craning your neck as the Manor looms. Even from the docks, it’s quite some distance up and over the bluffs. There seems to be a path cut in the stone, but with the weight of the goods you’re bearing, it could take some time.

The night, as the fog drifts out to sea, is relatively clear. You’ve made no effort to extinguish the lanterns on deck and disguise your approach, but someone would’ve had to have been _looking_ for you to spot you, right? You wonder, squinting up at the castle, if they’ve noted your ship drawing nearer, or if Lord Ampora simply has a habit of leaving the lights on or something.

One by one, with catlike grace, as the craft inches in towards the docks, Dirk and Roxy leap overboard to handle the lines and tie the _Ascension_ down. Aradia supervises wordlessly. You abandon the prow, ducking under the sail to sit on one of the many crates you intend to bring to stoke ol’ Dualscar’s professed lust for Aetrian treasures. At a guess, possibly the kitchenware set.

You have weapons to trade, and plenty of items with religious significance, but these will remain onboard. For now, it’s just the most banal of the lot of it. More jewelry, a cache of rare alcohols, the crate of plateware and another of the silverware to match, for feasting. The real objects of intrigue remain on board.

Ropes snake around tie-down sites as Dirk and Roxy deftly bring the small craft in. They leave the sail alone, for now. If a quick getaway needs to be made, that’s how you’ll do it.

A black steel rapier hangs from your left hip, a pistol from your right. You’re hardly armed to the teeth, but you imagine Dirk, at the very least, will more than make up the difference in terms of fire-and-or-blade-power. He leans in over the upper deck to help you make the easy step from the ship to the dock, and the sturdy wooden surface is the most solid thing you’ve put your weight on in over a week.

He holds you for a moment longer than he needs to, in the process of ensuring your safety, but stands with distance between you, at your side, as Roxy hops back in and begins to pass crates and luggage over. Best to get their collective weight off the deck quickly.

You shift from foot to foot in your fine boots, trying to ground yourself in a sense of place and self. The whole trick to acting is in the ‘convincing yourself, first’. What _should_ you be feeling? Some of the emotion-juice soaking your nervous system is exactly the kind you’d be basting in if you were fake-you, six-months-ago-you.

Nervousness, uncertainty, a sort of scrambling about frantically for some internal system for sorting out what’s happening in an unfamiliar context. The _Black Diamond_ alone practically overwhelmed you, the sudden reality of your ridiculous quest, the presence of a King, the utter majesty of face-to-face-ing with a supernatural God that hadn’t been locked in your basement, or your brain, for any number of centuries. You try to remember how that feeling, er, _felt_ , starting with your fingertips and toetips, letting it travel through you, in from your extremities to your heart, the agitated sense of anticipation like static coursing through your blood.

It feels unbearably weird, leaning against one of the massive wooden struts supporting the dock and watching your friends do all the work of unloading the ship, but you need to banish that sense of disentitlement entirely, so you do. You inhale one steadying breath and blitz yourself with thoughts that you know you ought to be thinking. _It’s so cold and damp, can’t they hurry it up?_ and _not so very graceful with thirty kilograms in your arms, are you, Dirk_ and _surely that’s an ergonomic way of lifting, but it makes you look ridiculous, did you know that?_

On the exhale, you’re standing, straight-backed and proper. To rationally sustain such uncharitable thoughts, your conduct must also be above reproach, and there’s no reason to be reclining against a filthy dock strut.

 _I need to sell these goods and get back home_ , you tell yourself, which feels true when you say it. _These people and these things and my wiles are all that I have to accomplish this task. I must get home. I am in a strange and terrifying new land, with no idea whatsoever of what to expect from this situation. Whatever happens will happen, but I’ll be alright. There is a shipful of treasure and my two presumably-faithful indentured servants between me and the undesirable end-state of ‘dying here’._

Beneath the drapey fabric of the high-necked cape, as you breathe, your _immulatio_ feel just a little tight around your throat. But that’s good. They would have, to six-months-ago-you. And they do now. It’s a helpful little tactile reference.

The sea air is frigid and wet with salt and dead-ocean-things. You wrinkle your nose, feel your bridge piercing shift beneath your glasses as you do so. Ech. Disgusting. The sooner someone comes along to bring you up to the Estate, the better. You really shouldn’t be out here for too long, it’ll do terrible things to your clothing, not to mention your complexion, and if you lose your health, not to mention your looks, you’ll be up shit creek with no paddle to speak of in this harsh and savage land.

Good. You have to overcorrect, at first, to get your thought-patterns firing off in the right order on autopilot. This is good.

You don’t have to dig for it, missing the Aetrian weather, the cool marble beneath your feet, the perfumed air of the palace, the dinner that would have been waiting for you, portioned out carefully at your place, no thinking to do at all if you didn’t want to. You’re hungry, with just a few bits of orange rolling around in your stomach. Will Aradia be alright, on the ship, will there be enough provisions for her?

Not a good thought. You shake your head, as though to reject it physically, and resume watching Dirk and Roxy work with an air of mild interest. They could be wearing fewer clothes. It would be more impressive if you could see their bodies moving around the effort of it. It’s awfully chilly out, of course, but bodies look so nice in the cold.

Hooves sound against bare rock, followed by the creaking of some sort of wagon, and you look over quickly to see a pair of older men driving a team of two large draft horses down the path cut into the bluffs. Both are beefy, grey-white percherons with flowing manes and dappled hindquarters. The wagon is almost distastefully simple and old-fashioned compared to the lovely horses, rough-hewn and unfinished wood, but capacious enough to accommodate your many trunks of clothing and goods for barter.

“Wrap it up, won’t you?” you call to Dirk and Roxy, playing your accent up - maybe you shouldn’t do that the whole time, perhaps not quite so thick, it could get distracting - and striding over to meet the two men cautiously beginning to dismount.

They don’t waste much time in appraising you before one climbs down to bow on the dock before you. Dersite-style. He’s a washed-out, faded-looking sort of fellow, his breath making steamy clouds in the light of a pair of lanterns affixed to the dray from beneath a scraggly set of whiskers. You don’t reciprocate the gesture.

“Your grace,” he begins, which is a good way for someone to start a sentence directed toward you. “Prince… English? Your imperial majesty, ah, your most eminent... grace.”

You raise a hand, open-palm, to dismiss the formality.

“Prince English will do just fine, my amigo, though you can call me anything you like if you’ve any intention of getting me and my coterie up that bluff? Given it’s cold enough to freeze the balls off a brass monkey, you’ll forgive me for skating over the formalities, I hope! Ah, but I’ve got a letter -” you pause here and wave Dirk over, “-from one of your master’s relatives, vouching for all you should need to know.”

Dirk, at your nodded encouragement, produces the letter from his sleeve and bows.

“My apologies,” the man replies, bowing _again_ , which strikes you as a little odd, not taking the letter. “We couldn’t precisely anticipate the day and time of your arrival, or my Lord would have met you himself.”

“Well, I’ll certainly agree to let bygones be bygones under the assumption that you’re about to cart me up to the castle up there and make it zippy!” you say, gesturing that Dirk ought to return the letter to his sleeve. “We’ve plenty to deliver to the manor, sight unseen.”

The other driver climbs down, and without being told to do so, they begin to help Dirk and Roxy load the dray. You try to guess at their ages, which is difficult. While fairly neatly done-up, dressed for the weather, and certainly muscular enough beneath their plain duds to lift heavy objects, they walk like all of their bones hurt terribly, and both have almost totally white hair. They don’t speak another word throughout the process, don’t challenge a thing you’ve said or raise their voices once until the crates and trunks on the dock have all been brought aboard the wagon.

In the process of turning down their offer to bring more up from below deck, you make sure they get a good look at Aradia, and characterize her verbally as a bloodthirsty but fundamentally trustworthy pirate who will be staying with her ship.

They seem to be quite alright with that, and eager, once they’ve registered her presence, to begin putting ground between themselves and the ship. So they’re not big piracy fans, that’s probably to be expected. You eagerly go along with it; you’re increasingly motivated to get into that massive, lit-up structure, where there will hopefully be fires and food to be wheedled out of _someone_.

All told, the greeting calms several alarm bells. Eridan offered no guarantee that he would be able to get in touch with Dualscar by raven, though he sent one off to a nearby settlement with instructions that it be delivered from there, even more mildly announcing your arrival as a ‘foreign prince’ with lots of euphemisms to indicate that you possessed the goods that he was looking to procure, and only vague intimations of an arrival time.

You permit Dirk and Roxy to help you into the wagon, expending almost no physical effort of your own, and sit sandwiched between them on a trunk, looking back at the docks, as the dray begins the bumpy ride up to the castle-y thing.

It’s difficult to observe the grounds in the dark, but they are sprawling and extensive and it’s several minutes by horse before you can really see the first structure. You recognize a few of the buildings that pass from the blueprints you’ve seen; washhouses, stables, granaries, equipment sheds, and seemingly endless slave quarters. None of it is in especially poor repair, all built in the same style, solid and squat and relatively simplistic, though it’s hard to tell.

Kanaya and Vriska will have their work cut out for them, making this trek at a walking pace before the winter-delayed sunrise, though you imagine that it will be doable.

While it’s a noisy and rather inclement ride - the wagon sure does bounce on the rocky surface of the path - you make a few attempts to strike up conversation with the fellows driving the thing, none of which bear out successfully. Your blithe comments on the lateness of the hour, the weather, the stark beauty of the countryside… nada. Zilch. You’re batting a thousand. They don’t deflect all that skillfully, either. Just sort of say ‘certainly, your grace’ or some remix of that approximate sentiment, as is appropriate. By some sets of standards, at least. Six-months-ago you would have found it disorienting, and so does the present-you frowning out from behind your eyes.

After a few particularly pronounced jolts, Dirk opts to circle an arm around your waist to keep you in place. Because no one is watching, you permit it, despite the fact that it is rather distracting and not very servant-like at all. He doesn’t try to kiss you, though you sort of wish he would, now that you know it’s not something he can do. The forbidden fruit appeal is strong, heh. He does, however, position himself so he sits as flush with you as he can manage, seated side by side.

Roxy, by contrast, is actually pretty good at pretending to be your indentured servant, and assiduously looks away from what is going on to the other side of you, despite sitting so near to your opposite shoulder that her body warms yours.

You do your best to pay attention to what you’re passing and whether anything is out of the ordinary, difficult as Dirk is making it, thumbing gently at your hip. Normally, it would be an intensely reassuring gesture. As six-months-ago Jake, and also as infiltrating-Estate-in-general Jake, it sets you slightly on edge. You can’t so much as whisper to him without being overheard by the drivers, after all.

One structure stands out, taller than the rest, decorated with finer carvings and stonework, the windows a black kaleidoscope of stained glass, the patterns of which are indecipherable in the dark. It’s new, has a _look_ of newness, which could mean anything in building-years, but you also don’t remember a _church_ on the charts and layouts Kanaya drilled you all on. Dirk pulls you a little closer. You’re certain he sees it, too.

You don’t wriggle out of his grip until you’re coming up on the portcullis that leads inside the inner wall. More servants-slash-soldiers are waiting, the heavy iron gate already pulled up from its moorings in anticipation of your approach, or simply to allow the dray to exit in the first place. You call them that because they can’t precisely be called ‘soldiers’, but are kitted out differently than the fellows driving the wagon, and they bear the Ampora sigil on their chests along with long spearlike thingies at the ready.

Dirk alone could probably mow through three dozen of them barehanded. The closer you get, the more apparent it is that they, too, are quite aged. You’d guess at late fifties, perhaps, but you might be wildly off, since Aetrian nobles almost certainly age more gracefully than whatever the hell these people are supposed to be.

Who are they defending the Estate against, anyway? What an oddly depressing thought, the idea of these men, old enough to be your grandfather, joints creaking in the cold wind as they play guard-keeper for a man the entire world thinks _dead_. Surely, no one is coming to try to kill or rob an imagined corpse.

And even if they were, wouldn’t it be better to put the younger folks up front to do the guarding, then? This is a little perverse. One of the fellows ushering the wagon through has a dry, hacking cough, and you shudder at the thought that any of them might get too close. It’s a far more effective deterrent than anything you imagine the man could do with the oversized weapon he carries.

The ground is smoother, here, inside the walls. It’s a neat but largely barren courtyard-like structure, boxed in on all sides by high walls of sheer stone, claustrophobic and likely unclimbable. The horses’ hooves strike what seems to be mostly granite, a uniform stone surface guiding the wagon across the near-treeless open space, echoing hollowly off every surface. You would guess that the courtyard could hold a few thousand people comfortably.

Tonight, it is empty save for a few tired-looking soldiers near a set of well-fortified double-doors.

With each second past the walls, you are second-guessing _everything_. The portcullis is still open, but you know that there’s absolutely no turning back, at this point. It all feels much, much, much too real. Would you have been this claustrophobically terrified, six months ago?

Probably. You didn’t spend much time outside of the palace or the temple. Novelty, situations in which you aren’t familiar, it’s always been overwhelming for you. Can’t really roll over on your back and fuck your way out of this one, either. Walls are not easily swayed by such tactics.

You do your little inhale-exhale trick again. These thoughts, and everything else, are happening to a character, a ‘you’ that you are piloting. _You_ think the sort-of-soldiers look ridiculous and unprofessional, the barren courtyard is _pathetic_ , not spooky as all fuck, and the walls speak of someone who is terrified of something out there, a sorry relic of a man who has desperately hidden himself away for half a century, fearing the consequences for his horrible crimes.

He has just opened his gates to his own undoing.

The wagon comes to a halt outside of the second set of doors, the drivers and a few soldiers heading over to help you begin to unload. Once you’ve climbed down - Roxy kneels and lets you use her as a step, a clever and creative touch - the double-doors swing open and warmth pours out.

You excuse yourself, abandon the wagon, and forge onward with a total lack of regard for the consequences, scarcely able to see where you’re going. Dirk and Roxy follow you doggedly as you pass the threshold to the inner sanctum of the castle. The servingpeople you’ve encountered thus far seem too thoroughly cowed to consider making off with your things, and where would they go, anyway? You’re itching to get inside, ideally to get to some kind of sleeping accommodations, where you’ll have a moment to yourself to actually figure out what you’re doing now that you’ve actually started doing it.

Gosh, but you really wish you’d gotten some practice in when the _Ascension_ was boarded. You wish it didn’t feel like you were doing this by the skin of your teeth.

The bleak, shadowy courtyard opens up into a capacious great hall, two long and ornately carved feast tables set up with a tiled area, like a dance floor or stage, within them. The tables themselves are bare, but long tapestries in an unfamiliar style decorate the stone walls. Up close, and in the light, the granite is a pale lilac color. You wonder if that’s the case for the entire castle. It’s quite beautiful.

While this enormous banquet-space, too, is empty, it’s far less staid and somber than the outer entryway. This is owed in part to an ornate chandelier, in what you suppose is some obscure Dersian style, since it’s like nothing you’ve ever seen before, in Aetria or the Court. It’s tiered in a way that rings familiar, a set of powerful white lights gleaming behind crystal-cut glass in a gold crown that yields to several drooping arms, each resembling the branches of some lovely golden tree, adorned with more white lights, bristling with crystals and gleaming with pearls, difficult as it is to tell from where you stand at least forty feet below. It’s truly massive, though, practically the size of a hundred-year-old oak’s canopy, entirely filling the vaulted ceiling, and from it, a basket of crystalline strands hangs down, so fine as to look like water droplets suspended in the air, culminating in a single pearl finial that must be the size of both your fists held together.

Oh, mother would have torn the place apart, stone by stone, just for that piece alone. You wonder if it will fit in Terezi’s lighthouse. Don’t you owe her a nicer chandelier? The light it generates is positively ethereal. Many of the features in the windowless hall are dour, but the prismatic effulgence it casts over the whole thing belongs in a marvelous fairy kingdom.

You wonder if it’s electrically powered. That’s the only obvious explanation; parts of the palace were, back home, but it was quite a novelty, and the temple wasn’t. Aradia did explain the whole concept of charcoal and whatnot to you, so it’s not as though Dersian technology doesn’t have a means of generating power. It’s just probably managed by some sad, sickly servingpeople with black lung ensconced beneath the Estate.

At your entrance, and subsequent gaping at your surroundings, a pair of older women appear from what both sounds and smells like the kitchens, eyeing the three of you with interest. Dirk and Roxy, you are relieved to note, are no less transfixed than you are by the opulence of the hall. Quite a transition after so long on the same tiny boat!

“Excuse me!” you call politely to the women, before they can vanish back to where they came. “Where might a fellow see about getting something to eat around here? Also, any chance I could ask after the whereabouts of the proprietor?”

“Only you three?” one of them, her face lined with age, but her hair still mostly dark, only shot sporadically with silver at the temples, replies.

“Er, yes, miss!” you explain. “I’ve one colleague left back on the ship that brought us here, though she’s disinclined to leave her vessel. D’you think we could see about getting her some food as well? She’s been very accommodating despite being, y’know, a filthy pirate and all.”

She raises her eyebrows as though some of this is surprising news, turns to call in an inaudible order into the kitchen, and then emerges to meet you.

“You’ll need to surrender those,” she announces brusquely, addressing Dirk and Roxy but notably excluding you as she gestures at their assorted weapons.

“Like _fuck_ I will -” Dirk begins, stops himsalf, and grimaces.

“They’ll be pleased to abide by any of your household rules, my good woman,” you say, shooting him a sternly rebuking _look_. “I’m afraid neither has much Common, or much sense, apparently.”

She laughs, sort of, a noise that mostly comes from her nose, and might just be an exhale, if she didn’t seem the kind of woman who did things either deliberately or not at all. You decide that she is probably some level of within-house ‘in charge’.

“Take them off,” you repeat to Dirk and Roxy - noting that Roxy has done a fantastic job of reacting as though the woman was speaking gibberish to her - tapping your own weapons for emphasis, miming the removal of your belt and holster. “Off. C’mon, get a wiggle on. They know that one fairly well, at least.”

This does not make her smile especially much, and the glance your way that follows, as they divest themselves of knife after knife, Dirk’s sword, Roxy’s third favorite gun, and one suspiciously located pistol, all in coelotrovic black steel, is more nervous than you’d strictly like, but oh well.

You are in character, and this character is emphatically supposed to be a maybe-threat to her. She is not supposed to like you immediately. You are _trying_ to throw her and anyone watching off-balance. That doesn’t mean it feels especially good. You know the queasy feeling of ‘oh dear, here comes another one I’ll have to worry about’ all too well.

“Miss,” you continue, as though you never had that thought, “if it’s all the same to you, those weapons _are_ my personal property. At very least, if I might send one of my servants to fetch a trunk in which they could be stored until our departure, I would be much obliged.”

It will be best to manage the gate-opening part of the plan before Dualscar makes an appearance, better still if the whole thing can be pulled off before he makes note of any absence.

“We have procedures in place,” the woman begins to protest, but you wave Roxy away, instructing her to bring a trunk in from the courtyard, and she bows formally and disappears.

“And I thank you, from the bottom of my heart, for being accommodating with said protocol,” you continue, blithely steamrolling over her objections. “I believe I have some goods that the master of your estate will find _very_ appealing, and I’ll hardly be able to show them and do the whole negotiate-y song and dance in good faith if I’m shaking in my shoes about the small fortune in fine weaponry you lot are playing around with, wouldn’t you say? My servants won’t wear their armaments on your grounds, if that is counter to your procedures, but I’ve selected some gifts for the manor, and their blades and firearms are not among them. I can assure you, they will not be used outside of whatever sleeping accommodations our host provides.”

You place a hand imperiously against the side of Dirk’s face, regarding him with a fond smile, and stroke his jaw contemplatively. As though you’re admiring a particularly handsome hunting dog. He stiffens, but doesn’t otherwise react.

“The matter will go to Lord Ampora’s discretion,” she says, curtsying and averting her eyes. “His Lordship has been anticipating your arrival eagerly. He’s been informed, and should be ready to greet you soon.”

“And the food?” you continue pleasantly, delivering a satisfied pat to Dirk’s cheek and letting your hand fall back to the pommel of your rapier.

“Preparations were made in the event of your arrival. A late supper will be out shortly.”

“Splendid! And before I forget to ask, like some kind of thankless reprobate, what was your name, ma’am?”

Her expression suggests that she is carefully weighing the potential consequences of refusing to answer. She looks up at Dirk, then further up at you.

“Bronya. Your grace.”

“Miss Bronya,” you echo, inclining your head in the slightest intimation of a bow. “A pleasure to make your acquaintance.”

“And yours, your grace,” she says, curtseying again and hurrying off as though each step burns the soles of her feet, leaving the surprising pile of weapons behind.

“How on earth does a person carry all of this in without jingling like an armory on wheels?” you sigh vaguely in Dirk’s direction, nudging the stack of mostly-knives with the toe of your boot. “Land’s sakes alive, do I _want_ to know where they fit?”

“Is that a rhetorical question?” he asks, with the slightest raising of a single brow. “Sir?”

You snort inelegantly.

“I’m a prince. The Dersian mode of address would be ‘your grace’. Really, come on now, I learned this nonsense in a week.”

“Forgive me. No, _your grace_ , I did not have my gun shoved up my asshole, though if you’re curious about how that would -”

“I don’t remember ordering you to _speak_ ,” you retort, to preempt another undignified laugh. Bizarrely, you feel increasingly at ease despite your growing cognizance of the fact that it’s _Dirk_ , here, who presents the liability, not you, for once. “You’re a touch more ornamental with your mouth closed, I’ll remind you. For someone with so little Common, you certainly manage to be flippant with it.”

Even standing a pace behind you, gaze cast down as respectfully as he can manage, he is unmistakeably dangerous, commanding. But you’ve learned an awful lot from studying his posture, watching him surreptitiously whenever you have the opportunity, and so long as he is playing it down and you are playing it up, you don’t think it should be an issue.

He goes quiet, which is probably for the best. That’s the whole damn point of the ‘bluh, my weirdo regressive S-and-M servants can’t speak Common, bluh’ ruse!

“There’s a good man,” you say, after a moment’s silence, and you mean it, too, even through the fabric of the two characters you are playing.

Having a little wrinkle to iron helps, so far as keeping yourself from spiraling down some panicked, speculative line of thought. Roxy should help to balance him out, and you will provide your own kind of counterbalance, and between the three of you, this will _work_. It _is_ working.

The moment’s semi-reprieve from scrutiny ends as the kitchen staff enter, bearing trays laden with food. Neither of you startle; it wouldn’t be in character for you, and you’ve never seen anything short of the supernatural, not even death itself, visibly throw Dirk for a loop, though he’s a little flushed when he glances up.

The proffered supper consists of a truly shocking amount of food. You wonder if they were expecting a larger trading party; Eridan likely didn’t specify. A number of women, all past their forties, at the very least, set plate after plate down. One fixes a flatware placement before you, and, when you request it, two more, one to each side of the chair you’ve claimed.

Dirk continues to stand at attention as the steaming dishes are arranged, curtsies are offered, and serving utensils are placed.

“Heavens to betsy, what a spread!” you announce, as the row of servingwomen stands at a sort of confused attention, seemingly waiting for instructions.

You don’t have to dig even a little for that sentiment. It’s a veritable feast. Some kind of massive roast, glazed with something amber-colored, set in a dish of braised root vegetables. Easily enough to feed thirty. Two similarly prodigious tureens of soup, both steaming-fresh, one red and tart-tomato-ginger-lemon-y, with generous pieces of stewed whitefish and tomatoes bobbing between leaves of fresh basil, the other herbaceous, deep purple-green with winter kale, unrecognizable mushrooms, and the meat of a game bird.

Beside the main components, a distinct platter of vegetables, asparagus and other hardy cruciferous greens, barely blanched and dressed with something light and mustardy, and a gorgeous crystal serving-bowl of pale lettuce, sugar snap peas, nuts, aggregate berries, and blue-marbled cheese round out the spread.

Handily, it could supply a small army for an overnight stay. You blink at it all in disbelief.

The head of the kitchens, as you are internally designating her, steps forward from the assembly and curtsies again. They must all squat a few hundred pounds, easily, with all the curtseying they get up to, you speculate.

“If you require us further,” she begins, but you cut her off before she can finish.

“Well, I’ll say I most certainly do! How in all seven hells d’you think three people are supposed to eat this much food? What an abominable waste!” you say. “Why don’t you all have a sit-down and help us out? There’s no way you didn’t work up an appetite whipping together such a florid tuck-in.”

Now it’s her turn to look wildly confused. You think she’s directing some perplexed face-journey at Dirk, but out of the corner of your eye, he responds with a shrug.

“With respect, your grace,” she says, very stiffly, “that would be beyond our station.”

“You don’t think ol’ Lord Ampora would begrudge you a bite of what you yourself cooked, do you?” you ask, leaning in with mild indignation. “If this all goes into some compost heap, I mean, what a horrible loss! What kind of fellow would stand for that in good conscience?”

Perhaps you’re pressing your ignorance a little. Her confusion twists into horror, but she’s clearly also unsure of how to get you to stop saying these things without putting herself in jeopardy. Oh dear. You hope you haven’t bitten off more than you can chew, here. This sort of reaction from such a staid gentlewoman has you seriously wondering whether the man in question is just going to stalk on in, guns blazing, and mow down any servingperson looking at him funny.

Cripes. Probably not. It’s an increasingly real gamble, though.

The heavy oak-and-iron door scrapes against the granite as it opens, and Roxy enters, dragging a trunk and setting it beside the weapons pile with an elaborate bow before returning to your side, visibly impressed by the food.

“Should we bring in a gift?” you muse aloud. “Just to start things off right? Or perhaps we ought to leave the matter to the Estate’s staff.”

Roxy gives you a wide-eyed ‘huh?’ kind of look and doesn’t take the excuse to leave again, so you suppose she’s gotten everything done and all is on track. Wonderful!

“Rest assured,” the woman from before says, “my staff will attend to all further concerns.”

“And good to hear it! Don’t suppose anybody wants us wandering around all willy-nilly on the grounds or any such nonsense, these are dangerous times, and I’ll be quite content to enjoy the indoors, particularly once the good Lord Ampora makes his presence known. You did mention he’d be coming down to greet us, didn’t you?”

His non-presence is starting to make you antsy, even with Roxy securely by your side and presumably triumphant. The servingwoman mostly seems relieved that you’ve let your casually-subversive suggestion that the lot of you eat together drop, and you smile placidly back at her as she nods affirmation.

“If it’s all the same, then, we’ll wait on supper until I have the chance to introduce -” you begin to say, only to be cut off by your own shifting interest as a set of less-reinforced but far more ornate double doors swing open from across the hall, held by two older fellows in the same sort of odd semi-military getup of brown leather and a violet crest as the soldier-y types from outside, who stand at attention with simple swords at their hips.

Huh. So he’s got guards, sort of. You rather think _you_ could take the two of them, even close-up, which is saying a lot, despite the fact that they’re possibly the tidiest and youngest looking men you’ve yet encountered. Dirk or Kanaya could probably cut them both in half with one swing.

Not that there’s any particular reason to do so; you’re not feeling any sort of love for Dualscar from any of these people, and you wonder if Kanaya might not have to elbow past a few people if she really does want to finish him off. Then again, by all accounts, there’s only one of him, and you’ve encountered at least fifty servingpeople thus far. Does the man not sleep? Is he walking around in a frothy discorporate bubble of anti-assassination magyyks?

All good lines of inquiry to pursue!

You turn away from the table, tilting your chin to indicate that Dirk and Roxy ought to do the same, and the entire line of kitchenworkers seems to simultaneously hold their breath.

While it’s unclear what anyone is expecting, including yourself, you force your shoulders into a relaxed but no less refined position, set your hands elegantly at your sides, and mold your expression into a mask of mild interest.

He steps into the sparkling light of the hall with little additional fanfare. Despite the hour, he’s in full regalia, a black frock coat over a deep violet doublet and a tidy matching cravat. The fractal patterns of white light dazzlingly catch the gold in his ears, the gilded epaulettes at his shoulders, and the gold practically dripping down his hands before anything else.

You abandon the table to intercept him, with an imperious flick of your wrist to indicate that Roxy and Dirk ought to stay where they are, and are immediately struck by just how friggin’ _tall_ the fellow is. Maybe not quite as musclebound as Mr. Zahhak, but you wouldn’t be too eager to bet a great sum on _either_ of them in an arm-wrestling contest.

The radiance from the chandelier catches his face properly as you approach, and if you weren’t deep in-character, you would be hard-pressed not to gasp at it. Kanaya was vague about the damage that she had left him with, only clarifying that one could reasonably expect it to prove fatal.

While he has the same sort of ambiguously tanned coloration as Eridan, from the lower left portion of his mandible to the upper right reach of his temple, ghastly white ... scar tissue? ... stretches across what might have once been a handsome face. Rather than the gnarled but laid-flat appearance of a typical scar, though, he could almost be wearing a mask of half-melted candle wax. The bridge of his nose is uneven, too small, jaggedly torn away. As your gaze rakes over the damage, you can make out the crescent-moon shape of vague teeth marks just above where his eyebrow ought to be, the point at which someone started ripping his face off.

So Kanaya definitely didn’t lie about that. Not one bit.

When he blinks, turns slightly to survey the sparsely-set but food-crowded table, the row of discomfited serving-maids, and finally, you, the pallid mask moves with him, like it’s perfectly joined with the remnants of his skin, as alive as the rest of him.

One of his eyes, the one veiled entirely in the strange bloodless flesh, is milk-white and pupil-less. He fixes you with the other, a deep jewel-purple, as you stride up to meet him.

“Lord Ampora,” you announce. “I must apologize for the late and ill-announced hour of our arrival. Your hospitality is appreciated without reservation.”

It’s almost grotesque, watching him blink again, so close that you could reach up and touch it. Is it as slippery as it looks? His blind eye never seems to fully close beneath the near-translucent fleshy lid. You are better-bred than to stare, but you hold eye contact, your mouth in a resolute smile.

“And you would be Prince English,” he replies, in a tone that proves as much of a surprise as his countenance. For lack of any better description, he speaks with almost precisely the same over-articulation as Kanaya. It’s eerie, hearing her clipped, formal inflection in his disarmingly soft tenor as opposed to her melodious contralto profundo. And it doesn’t match the stature of the man, or the bearing and intonation of either of the Amporas you’ve yet encountered.

“Prince Jake English,” you announce, “brother to the Empress, twice named under the auspices of the silk house of Harley, sole living successor to the Aetrian throne. And honored, might I add, by your opening your home to my visit.”

Holding the posture for one long moment more, your head held high, shoulders squared, in every respect the picture of Dersian man-dignity, you offer him a rakish smile.

Then you expertly hook a fingertip in the fabric of your cape, give it a flick of the wrist, as you would when unfurling a long skirt, so that it opens gracefully, and lower yourself into the most subservient curtsy that you can muster. A greeting that both implicitly declares and effectively places you at someone’s mercy.

Your weight is balanced practically on one knee, your gaze lowered but not cast down. It’s how you would have been traditionally expected to greet mother or Jane, though certain patrons tended to get a kick out of it as well, and you’ve been on the receiving end an awful lot in your day. You’re curious exactly what is going to happen, adrenaline and the excitement of the game being _on_ driving out any room for hesitation.

If he makes some move to harm you, it may be a very short visit. Dirk is still quite near the weapons pile, after all. You are completely safe. You have made this gesture so very many times.

What’s new, though, is the fact that, within your lowered vantage point, the top of his dark head of well-kept hair is suddenly in view. Looking up in earnest, without leaving the position, you realize that he has made an attempt to reciprocate the gesture.

For a moment, you are sincerely thrown off. It’s somewhat like watching a caged bear perform a dainty little dance; even kneeling, he practically looms over you. But he does seem to be holding the gesture in earnest, waiting for you to end it.

You do, standing gracefully, tucking your counterbalance-leg back beneath you, once again shoulder-width apart. He’s slower to do the same, grimaces with the effort of it, but stands to his full height. Seventy-six years old, and just now managing to show it. Goodness gracious.

“You must forgive my form,” he says, a touch wryly. “I have minimal opportunity to practice, though I was deeply intrigued by the delegation I received a few weeks past. Aetrian customs are unusual, to say the least. Fascinating, though.”

“I’m rather inclined to agree,” you say airily. “I feel much of that same profound bamboozlement, the more I learn of Dersian tradition.” There’s an understatement. “Lovely digs you’ve got here, though. After months of the utter _savagery_ I’ve endured on the seas, it’s a welcome luxury to see something beautiful again.”

You gesture up at the chandelier; he nods approvingly.

“Please, have a seat. The kitchens’ preparations may have been overzealous, but I wouldn’t have an esteemed guest such as your grace arrive to an empty or inadequate table,” he says. “While the notice of your visit was received in good time, I had little -”

“Yes, it’s an awfully small coterie, isn’t it?” you cut in over him, watching as annoyance flashes briefly in his odd melted-wax visage in response to the interruption, then disappears. You can feel your confidence growing by the second. You are flighty, unpredictable, a little stubborn, and kind of obnoxious, but it’s part of the charm with this sort - he will find it all the more satisfying when you do accede to his will, at your discretion. “I’ll confess, I’ve already traded away a bedeviled _king’s ransom_ to get this far, and had I acquired any more assistance on the way, I doubt I’d have anything of value to offer you! Not all buyers have the keen eye for Aetrian craftship that I’ve been told you possess, my lord.”

“We can discuss business later,” he says, a touch dismissive, though his alive-eye is alight with interest as Dirk pulls out your heavy wooden chair while you seat yourself, closing in behind you along with Roxy, still standing at attention.

“Sit,” you instruct them, turning in your seat and indicating each chair beside you in turn. They both comply without argument, until you throw up a hand to stop them, as though you’ve just remembered something important. “Or are you averse to company at the table, Lord Ampora? Your staff seems quite reluctant about joining in.”

He raises his one attached eyebrow, the gesture tugging at the boundary between healthy, even-textured tan skin and ghoulish white. One of the lined-up servingmaids swallows audibly.

“I’m aware that Aetrian custom differs from Dersian sensibilities in many regards. I leave the matter to my guest.”

“Spiffing!” you say, allowing Dirk and Roxy to properly take their seats and immediately setting about making a plate for yourself.

A younger maid - ‘younger’ being relative - swoops in to set a place for Dualscar as well, across from the three of you, and another similarly takes out his chair. You’re relieved to find that the conventions you studied don’t _appear_ to be outdated. As they fuss over the table, you try to match the scrutiny he is leveling at Dirk and Roxy, hoping to beat him to the punch.

“What about these lovely young ladies?” you add. “It’d be nothing short of a crying shame if they didn’t have a nip of the fine smorgasbord they must’ve worked so hard to put together.”

The woman pouring from a copper vessel of burgundy wine starts and spills it on the tablecloth, apologizing hastily and taking a cloth from her apron to dry the fast-spreading stain. Dualscar holds up a hand; she freezes and takes two swift steps back. None of the others so much as twitch, still as statues.

“Of course,” he says amiably. “I’m more than amenable to alternative approaches. As a gesture of my willingness to learn from your practices, the staff will see to the dispersal of the meal amongst themselves when you have had your fill.”

He dismisses them with a gesture.

“Ha, well, I should hope so!” you reply with a smile. “Really, I’ve been aching for a little familiarity. The barbarism of the southernmost ports, not to _mention_ that dreadful pirate whatever-the-fuck... I must say, I’m awfully glad to be in the company of a gentleman who sees the logic for dignity in the treatment of those below himself.”

“Would that be why you brought a pair of armed slaves into my home?”

“Right in one!” you say, without missing a beat. “Though I was more than a little taken aback at how quickly your staff moved to confiscate them. I did wish a moment of your consideration, as to the matter of their armaments. I like them kitted out a certain way, y’see, if only in my own chambers - or, of course, back on the ship, if you’d have me stay elsewhere.”

An affront to his welcome even to suggest it, really. You smile, innocent and accommodating as a spring morning.

“Not at all. I insist, as a matter of fact, on your accepting my hospitality. Accommodations have already been prepared, and given your proclivity for abstemiousness in matters of _food_ , I’d invite you to take advantage of what has already been put together in good conscience.”

Gosh, but he talks _exactly_ like Kanaya. That’s the second time the thought has risen, unprompted, to the surface of your conscious appraisal of the situation, and it’s fucking uncanny. He hesitates, though, and you hold your silence, taking a delicate bite of the rather gamey but well-cooked roast meat, waiting to hear where he’s going with that.

“I’m not accustomed to a superabundance of visitors,” he adds. “It’s a pleasure to have you here for its own sake. I hope that you will have confidence in the sincerity of my welcome beyond mere business.”

You allow yourself to preen at that. Good Dersian manners, of course, the cherished art of hostmanship. But something sincere, too. This magnificently garbed man, in this magnificently ornamented hall, on these magnificently bleak and lovely bluffs, with a staff that is absolutely ground under his heel, by all accounts. Is is really so magnificent without anyone around to genuinely say so?

“I couldn’t accept a welcome without such conviction in its bona fides, as it were, and rest assured, you’ve more than sated my appetite for certitude,” you say. “And gosh, but this is delicious!”

This sort of back-and-forth is a game you could comfortably play for hours, saying absolutely nothing but ‘oh boy you are so rich and polite’ and hearing nothing but ‘yes, you are also very rich and polite, aren’t we just the two richest and politest people in this whole friggin’ world?’ in return.

It has nothing to do with the temple, really. Half of what you learned there was _un_ learning these sorts of strict societal conventions. It was you and Jane at the table, practicing with silverware and empty niceties made saccharinely sincere by their delivery and the inevitable status differential between the two of you and anyone you might be dining with, save mother.

Notably, he hasn’t served himself anything to eat, though he sips at a glass of wine. You mime doing the same, but don’t actually drink. His scrutiny, no longer directed exclusively towards you, keeps slipping coolly over to Dirk and Roxy.

“I appreciate your indulgence of myself and my staff,” he replies. “Despite my evident unfamiliarity with Aetrian practices, as I hope I’ve demonstrated, I’m more than willing to accept them. It’s my honor to partake in your… unique cultural mores. Your attendants may carry whatever you wish them to carry, wherever you wish them to carry it.”

You smile winsomely and put a possessive hand on Roxy’s shoulder, not quite sure you want him thinking anything about either of them, or looking much at them, either, if you can avoid it. She is way too good at this, making doe eyes over the table like she doesn’t have a clue what she’s looking at. She’s trusting you to look after her. How bizarre is that!

“What a relief to hear it,” you say. “I’ll admit, I’ve grown _very_ fond of these two over the course of my travels. And you should see them all decked out, really. There’s something terribly noble about a well-outfitted servant. They’re both handsome enough as-is, but they make quite a picture gussied up properly.”

He chuckles mirthlessly, sets his goblet down to rake a bejeweled hand full of rings through his hair. An uncommonly familiar and unregimented sort of gesture. Of course, he would be at ease in his home.

“Far be it from my place to offer you advisement on any such matters, but you’re yet a young man, your grace. These sorts of attachments are treacherous ground. And almost certainly as confusing for them as for you. Well-delineated boundaries keep these relationships functioning. Toeing at them is a heavy thing indeed.”

So perhaps Roxy’s eyelash-flutters have been having their desired effect. How silly of him, to try to help you. Six-months-ago-you would find that sort of unprompted weighing-in more absurd than anything, but it genuinely rankles something in your inside-you gut. The utter presumption.

“Ah, they’ll have their freedom in La Ansephemine, should this _hellacious_ odyssey ever _end_ ,” you contend, your tone far lighter than your thoughts on the matter. “I don’t see the potential for harm, and they have every motivation to serve me well and faithfully as I deliver them to a far better life in Aetria. Picked them up in Lopan for a rather staggering cost. They’ve very charming, don’t you agree?”

“I would have to be a fool not to,” he says politely.

Dirk, from the corner of your eye, once you finally risk a glance over, looks like he _really_ would like to say something. Roxy, on the other hand, giggles as though she’s very aware that she is being praised, and leans in to rest her head solicitously against your shoulder. You slice off a little of your portion of roast, take it between two fingers, and feed it to her by hand.

Not his, yours.

You can almost _hear_ Dirk’s nails digging into his thigh, and click your tongue disapprovingly in response to his disquiet. If you can register the tension in his shoulders, without even _looking_ at him, Dualscar certainly can as well. And from the looks of it, he very much _does_ notice, turning his appraisal politely-but-thoroughly to your right. You are regretting having given him conversational license to do so. Hrrmmph. To ease any suspicion he might have about Dirk’s glowering mien, you cut another piece, turning away from Roxy.

“Open,” you tell him. “You’ve hardly touched dinner.”

Dirk has a funny way of blushing, splotchy color rising to his cheeks and forehead and the bridge of his nose. It’s what he’s doing now, though he parts his lips willingly and lets you feed him.

Looking up, you feign surprise at the fact that the fellow across the table is still watching, as though you’d completely forgotten he was there.

“The poor dear was seasick for the entire trip,” you sigh. “While I’m fortunate enough not to suffer much from it, I must say, we’ll all be in better spirits once we’ve slept in a stable bed for a night. I’m not much of a fan of travel by sea, and the last few months of being dragged about hither and yon by the absolute _dregs_ of that atrocious pirate settlement have really only cemented my distaste.”

“Ah, yes. I’ve heard of your travels, and the tragic conditions of your kidnapping, but I’ll be very interested in the details of how you’ve managed to preserve yourself thus far. I’m sure you have some fascinating stories to share. I was something of a seafarer myself, in youth.”

“Long stories, if not fascinating, but I’d be all too glad to tell them,” you say, then bite back a yawn. “See, I don’t know precisely what you’ve heard of the dreadful siege the fucking _scoundrels_ tried to carry out against our capital city, but when they scurried off, tails between their legs before the might of the Aetrian military, they did manage to - and this was my own fault, really, I’ve always been a touch too romantic about such matters for my own good - a lovely piratess lured me out, promising to defect and remain in La Ansephemine with me if I came to spirit her away from her crew, only to cruelly double-cross me, throw me in chains, and break my lovelorn heart. And that’s only the very beginning!”

“Perhaps better suited for the morrow, then. My manners have clearly failed me; you must be exhausted, your grace.”

“Wait just a second,” you say, pausing over your plate, though you set your eyebrows as tiredly and beseechingly as possible, “I’ve some gifts to present, I was really hoping to get the ball rolling, as it were, tonight, so as to prove I’ve no intention to waste your time. An offering, y’see, to show my gratitude, to get things off on the right foot.”

“Are they not, already, on that selfsame foot?” he suggests. “There’s no urgency to these negotiations, my prince.”

“If the goods I brought up from the ship could be transported to my accommodations, then?”

“Of course.”

He snaps his fingers - improbably, since the jewelry weighs so heavy on them - and the soldiers at the door hurry to his side.

“Move Prince English’s belongings to his room,” he tells them. “Instruct the maids to heat water, should he choose to use it, and to turn down the bed.”

They bow and disappear down the hall from whence he came.

Your plate is more or less cleaned, as is Roxy’s. Dirk has moved some things around, but you’re surprised and a little concerned by just how little. You’d have thought he’d be over the moon to have protein other than jarred beef stew and dried fish, and had rather expected him to go to town on it.

“I thank you most emphatically for your preeminent consideration,” you say, standing from your seat and gesturing that Dirk and Roxy ought to do the same. “Take your things,” you add, patting Roxy encouragingly on the shoulder.

She half-nods-half-bows assent, and kneels to begin retrieving the small arsenal she’d had hidden in her clothing, knife by knife. Dirk quickly follows suit. He likely feels naked without the veritable armory he packed into his sleeves, some-friggin’-how.

Dualscar continues to observe with more interest than you would strictly prefer.

“Interesting material,” he observes, and you turn away slightly to hide any suggestion of a grimace. Of course that’d be the first thing he’d comment on. It tells you something, too. Does he know what it is? Would the delegation have had any cause to mention it as one of Aetria’s riches? Perhaps a high-ranking dignitary might carry a blade or two.

Coelotrovic steel has a dull black sheen, even when finely polished. It’s an odd kind of material in a lot of regards; light as typical steel, the color of cast iron, near-impossible to break or even deform, as far as you know. It’s not ideal for a whippy-springy type of sword, but it’s popular both as a sign that the bearer can afford it and for the uncommon durability. Once formed, the weapons almost never need to be sharpened. A decades-old, much-used blade will retain the same edge with which it was ground at its creation. They’re popular weapons among the few who could afford so much as an ounce of the stuff, which is not many, but not none, either.

You don’t actually know how they _are_ made, of course. It’s not as though you carried pointy shit around in the temple or the palace, and back when you were a child, you wouldn’t have been instructed with a blade worth its weight in gold.

“They’re made of a special kind of steel that our weaponsmiths use for all sorts of purposes,” you explain, erring on the side of caution, as Dirk and Roxy sheath knife after knife, buckle on sword belts and holsters and fill them with their respective stabby or shooty implements. “It’d be the highest sort of ridiculousness, trotting in a couple of fine guards such as those I’ve got here and simply disarming them. I mean, no offense and all, these are valuable pieces of weaponry! Sort of a status symbol, I suppose? You probably wouldn’t guess to look at them, but a single one of those weapons could have bought my mother’s crown.”

There, a sincere disclosure without any of the important god-killing-y details. You can use his interest, lean on it to figure out what exactly he knows, whether he sees the mythical properties of the weapons as desirable, whether he’s even aware of them in the first place. Does he have designs on deity-commanding, or does he already have independent means to do so?

All good questions, all answerable in the process of fulfilling your distract-y purpose. That’s a win in the making if you’ve ever had one! Worst comes to worst, you can dangle the truth in a less dangerous form - ‘oh, Lord Ampora, legends speak of the qualities of coelotrovic steel… the name itself means ‘deity-commanding’, isn’t that just a poignant snippet of myth? We have stories of a god-killer, too, a few centuries back, the First Empress. Come to think of it, I think I’ve got a funerary shroud with her image on it back at the ship, shall we go and have a look? There’s no better way to learn about Aetrian culture than firsthand! Also, I have some more of that steel, if you’ve any interest, I’m up to my ears in the stuff!’

Yes, there are a million and a half ways to spin this, all of which serve your intentions to a ‘T’.

“Fascinating,” he agrees, marveling from a respectful distance. “If there’s no trouble, then, I’ll have the stewardess of the great hall escort your -”

“Dirk and Roxy, that’s how they like to be called,” you interrupt pleasantly, as he pauses to gesture towards your friends.

“Your Dirk and Roxy,” he continues, bemused, “to the servants’ quarters.”

“That won’t be necessary,” you tell him, smiling. “Unless your accommodations are inadequate for three?”

Glove to the face. You’re betting he won’t take the challenge for what it is; you’re a little stupid, a little clumsy, and he knows these conventions so very much better than poor little you. And you’ve got all these nice gadgets and gizmos to sell him, and an empire to promise him, and whatever else he wants. It would be too easy, really, if you didn’t make him work for it.

He raises his eyebrow. Once again, the gesture turns his masklike face impossibly more grotesque.

“Nothing of the sort, my prince. I merely expected, given the quartering of the previous delegation’s aids in the servants’ quarters, that such was common practice. Forgive my presumption.”

“They’re hardly _caro supellecta_ ,” you tell him, indulgently as you can muster, like you’re correcting a child who hasn’t quite got the alphabet down, but is charming for having tried at all. “I look forward to elucidating a few of our more obscure stratifications of role; it’s actually one of the most sensible parts of the Aetrian way of doing things, once you’ve got the hang of it.”

He dips his head in a nod of acquiescence.

“It may take a moment, to prepare additional sleeping arrangements, though your lodgings, you will find, are more than capacious enough to -”

“Ah, quite unnecessary,” you chuckle. “I don’t think we’ll be needing more than one bed.”

Roxy has finished her weapon-retrieval before Dirk. She’s slightly more sensible about _quantity_ of armaments. You snap your fingers at him. Gods, you’re so close to having a decent rest, a _bath_ , there is absolutely no way he needs that many knives. Straightening up, he tucks the last away, still looking rather stiff and ill-at-ease.

You’ve mostly missed Dualscar’s reaction, but at this point you’re just showing off your grasp of character. He’s been trying very hard to make himself seem a potential convert, which you appreciate. By way of reciprocation, you’re posing as the paragon of spoiled, shallow prince-ety. Just as easy to sway to his purposes, if he only puts in the work to disabuse you of your childish Aetrian notions. It’s a delicate sort of dance to keep up, but you’re damn good at this, and so far, you’re feeling pretty tops about the whole thing.

“Breakfast will be served at sunrise,” he tells you. “Though at this time of winter, that’s fairly late in the morning. If you find yourself exhausted when you wake, there will be a meal waiting whenever you make your way to the hall. Attendants will see to your needs as you voice them. I would ask that you travel with your servants, not to let them wander about unescorted with weapons on their hips, merely to avoid giving the wrong impression to my own staff, if you’d be so kind.”

In answer, you bow, a kind of messy imitation of the Dersian convention. He’s smiling when you look up.

“Tomorrow, I must see about those stories, and I should greatly like to see more of the Estate, as well. Surely it is even more grand in the daylight,” you tell him.

“It will be my honor and privilege,” he replies. “Rest well, Prince English. I look forward to working with you.”

“And yourself, my lord,” you say, putting your hand on Dirk’s waist and offering him a jaunty wave with the other.

His guards return - you’re not certain how, unless they were literally waiting outside of the doors for a break in conversation - along with two maidservants, who lead the three of you out of the hall and up a different winding staircase, entirely avoiding eye contact, save for what you make to be sympathetic glances to Dirk and Roxy. You wouldn’t see them if you weren’t specifically looking for it, and you tighten your hold on Dirk’s hip in answer.

The accommodations are as fine as promised; a rather massive room, bare lilac granite, but well-built, decently insulated, and containing a chest of drawers, a few plush chairs, most of the crates and trunks from the ship, and two soldier-types on their way to fetch the rest after depositing this load. You wince internally at the thought of these aged fellows bringing all of your belongings up that elegant but steep set of stairs. Ah well.

In addition to the sparse ornamentation and otherwise plush furniture, the clear centerpiece of the sprawling room is a rather enormous four-poster bed, though you note with a frown that it doesn’t have the Aetrian-style canopy and the sheets appear to be made of spectacularly fine-woven cotton, but not _silk_. What is this, amateur hour? Admittedly, still a hell of a lot nicer than the hammock, and quite capacious, which suits both the number of people involved in the sleeping and the impression of debauched royalty you hope to convey. Plenty of room for imagined shenanigans. You’ll just have to give the guards something to gossip about.

There’s also an equally massive bathing-room adjacent to the quarters, connected by a stone arch and a set of fine-hewn granite steps, with a heavy mahogany door that closes it off, if called for. Inside, an enormous above-ground stone tub rises from the floor, carved to a smooth sheen of the same dusky purple-grey rock as all the rest.

It’s not, as you expected, full of steaming water. Rather, the steam emanates from a pump. Crude, very unlike the Aetrian system of pipes and taps, but it seems to have heated up quickly enough. A few glass vessels of oil and soap and salt rest appealingly at the rim. It’s a fairly well-sized thing. Not quite so large or as nice as your tub at home, of course, no pretty tiling or mosaic art or beautiful gold fixtures, but the three of you could share it comfortably, if you had any intention of doing so.

“Roxy, dear, go ahead and clean yourself up,” you say, which is weird, now that you’re alone-ish, the door to the hall still ajar to allow the soldier fellows to bring up the rest of the gear, but otherwise not under clear scrutiny.

You hope she’s imagining that translating to ‘why don’t you take the first bath, since it’d be pretty awkward, in my book, for us all to share or whatever?’ when she grins and curtsies and takes her leave, shutting the door behind her.

Dirk grinds his teeth. He’s not even trying, at this point.

“What a surprise,” you laugh. “Something you’re not immediately good at.”

“May I speak freely? Your grace,” he retorts, catching himself quickly but not seamlessly.

“No,” you say, and he goes kind of pink and splotchy again, and his shoulders do that _thing_ , and you realize - “Goodness gracious, you _like_ this, don’t you? You’re getting off on this.”

“I don’t like liking it,” he grumbles. “S’really distracting, and I’m kinda not in this to get my fucking jollies, actually.”

“Pipe down. Unpack the trunk with all of our nightclothes in it, if you like taking orders so very much. And really, you must do something about that glower. Our generous host is going to think that you don’t enjoy your position.”

This shuts him up, as you thought it might. Oh, this is very rich. Poor Dirk. And you can really mess with him, in-character, too. It’s close to being too much power. How did you miss it, throughout the meal? Busy with other things, with mental chess games and contemplation.

Very strange, the idea that you stopped microdissecting every little thing he was doing. _While he was still physically present_. You like that power a lot less than you like the idea of him doing everything you say without question or consequence. Sigh. The last thing you need right now is some kind of reckoning about the nature of your love, which is quite set in stone. You need him, always, all the time. You wouldn’t have been comfortable enough to slip fully into your role, to disregard him at all, if he wasn’t around making you feel that way in the first place. He protects you. You trust him, and to that end, you _need_ him. You do.

Gosh, but he is such a funny man, all that power and all that grace and he’s using it to lug a crate over to the far corner of the room, beneath one of several windows. A lantern hangs in each of them; the flame within it burns normal orange. Another cluster hang overhead, casting the same orangey firelight over the room. Huh. You’d thought they might be chemically treated to turn white, which would explain the odd color on your way in. Walking over to inspect the windowsills, you’re almost definitely looking down at the direction from which you approached. You can just barely, maybe make out the mast of the _Ascension_ in the distance.

Perhaps the crew of servingpeople will bring something out for Aradia to eat, or you can negotiate such a thing tomorrow morning. Looking down at the dark windswept moors, you wonder whether Kanaya and Vriska are inside the walls, yet, whether they’ve found a safe berth in one of the auxiliary buildings within them. It’s very cold out.

Dirk hefts another crate. Both were stacked on top of a trunk that might contain the right clothing, and this one he moves to a different corner, after verifying that it is the ‘initial gift’ set of plateware. You’d rather watch him than think about your friends’ far less comfortable straits.

It really is kind of a surprise, his being such an atrocious servant for all purposes but ‘carrying heavy things and having knives’, though on another level, it’s not a surprise at all. Isn’t that what the Sea King said? He wouldn’t survive what you did. With his attitude he would backtalk himself out of the temple and into the streets within a week. There are other options, but few palatable. You suppose that a trouble with Aetria might be that there is not a lot of room for people who can’t follow orders. He might make a good craftsman, but he’d struggle in an apprenticeship with anyone he didn’t truly respect, and you’ve met few enough people who fit that bill.

He’s a better pirate than just about anything else. Though he is very nice to look at.

“Take off your shirt,” you tell him, leaning against one of the bare posts of the finely-carved bedframe.

Looking up, he nearly drops the crate. You click your tongue, and add a few emphatic gestures, as though he might not have understood you the first time.

“Shirt. Off. You heard me correctly. I’d like to watch you properly while you work.”

If the ruddy hue to his cheeks from before ever fully abated, it is back in full force. His hands move to the buttons at his collar, and he undoes them swiftly, keeping his eyes averted. His chest is smooth and shapely as ever, the fine v-shape of his muscular body revealed as the buttons fall away.

The soldiers interrupt before he can finish, carting in two more trunks, and get quite an eyeful for their troubles. Dirk pauses, looking up as if to ask how to react.

“I didn’t tell you to stop,” you say simply, and he strips the rest of the garment off hastily and stands, seemingly confused about what to do next, with his shirt balled up in one fist.

In a second, you’re alone again, the soldiers hurriedly finished with their task, and the door is closed, this time. Gossip spreads fast in a palace; you know that better than anyone. If Dualscar had any doubts about what was going on behind closed doors, he doesn’t anymore. And now he has an imagined inroad with you, too. Since surely there must be something to exploit about your _over-attachment_ to your servants.

You’re distracted from scheming when Dirk kneels to open the trunk, finds that it contains only your formalwear, and goes to stand again, the impressive musculature of his back shifting enticingly in the lanternlight. There’s a fairly loud sound of running water filling a tub echoing in from the bathroom.

Roxy almost certainly can’t hear you. It’s excellent auditory camouflage.

“Stand up straight,” you tell him. He does so, having thoroughly cottoned on to your game. His blush is subtle, now. You can see him contending with twin impulses to argue and to yield, visible in the clench of his hands, the twitch as his fingers curl but don’t quite ball into fists.

He doesn’t look you directly in the eye. The longer you comb him over with your gaze, the more he has to fight not to squirm beneath your observation. Still, the thunder of water on stone, the howl of wind past the windows. You cross your arms, giving him a smile.

“You’re a very handsome thing, aren’t you.”

The cartilage of his trachea shifts as he swallows.

“Well? Don’t you agree?”

“Thank you, your grace,” he says stiltedly.

“Not invulnerable to compliments when you can’t argue against them,” you note. “You’re a dish when you’re flustered. Do you think you could hold your tongue if I had you strip down the rest of the way, really got a look at you?”

“Prince -”

You never had much affection for the title, but you don’t mind it a bit on his lips.

“Lock the door,” you tell him coolly. “You’re aware, of course, that there are plenty of less… involved activities, I mean, that you might carry out for me, if you thought them more urgent.”

Best to give him an out, just in case. You don’t think he’d need one, but you sure would, in his position, in a hypothetical set of circumstances where you were ever not in the mood to do what he told you.

“Yes, your grace. I’m aware,” he says, stepping over to the chamber door and sliding a heavy bolt through the lock, testing it once, and returning to his position.

The water is still running in the bathroom. You can’t find it in your heart to care too much if Roxy uses it all up. Frankly, you can feel your pulse in your face. Dirk has himself propped up against a set of crates, watching you with some nameless sentiment, though he looks away again when you meet his eyes.

You should have plenty of time for this. Dear Gods, it has been a long week and a half. You’ve been doing so much thinking, and so much getting-into-character, and what better way to show that than… er, showing it?

“Strip down for me,” you tell him. He obliges, wriggling out of his trousers and boots with impressive haste. You’ve never seen Dirk so asynchronously _awkward_ about being naked; this isn’t a strip show or a routine undressing, he’s tripping over his own fingers, and you’re almost more heart-warmed than you are turned on by the whole deal.

He’s so bad at this. It’s unbearably charming when you finally find something he can’t do right. And how funny, and how weirdly comforting, that he can’t be you. He is so damn terrible at trying to be you, his skin rosy all over, from the hard muscles shifting over his shoulderblades to the slight dimples in the small of his back.

It’s an art, being ‘into it’ but not, like, _into it_ , making it clearly about the other person despite the act being clearly amenable to oneself. And he’s enjoying it far, _far_ too much, his eyes so dark, his expression positively perfervid, and oh, dear Gods, he turns to face you full-on and you wonder how long he’s been _hard_ inside of his trousers, his dick blood-flushed and slick with arousal.

While the chamber is fairly warm in comparison to the winter-windstorm happening outdoors, it’s chilly enough that you can’t be totally sure whether the shudder that runs through his body, the gooseflesh that prickles on his biceps, is owed to the cold or to your heavy-lidded appraisal.

“Well,” he says, his tone low and thick, “planning on whipping out a notebook and doin’ some figure sketch practice?”

“Your Common improves so remarkably when you have a quip to deliver.”

He crosses his arms over his ribs, like he’s weighing whether to push back any further.

“I speak only the language of love,” he retorts, after a pause that stretches just a beat too long, then looks you in the eye. “Your grace.”

Oh, he thinks he’s so clever. You barely have a millisecond to decide how you’re going to react to the absolute impudence of - he’s practically breaking character to dig at you, _trying_ to provoke you - of course he is. Good practice, anyway, to keep a level head.

You oblige him anyway.

“How very bold of you. A regrettable use of such a fine and musically renowned _mouth_. Get on your knees, dear. Don’t make me tell you twice.”

For a moment, you consider laying down your cape to make it easier for him, but you quickly disregard the thought. Some bruising, you think, might suit him just fine.

He’s less tentative than his shivery manner would suggest, bending at the knee without hesitation, easing himself down with a hand. In the light from the overhead fixture, he glows warm and orange-gold, contrasting splendidly with the lavender granite. He tilts his jaw in defiance, looking up at you with his lips set in a thin line, his stare meeting yours, challenging you to break the detente, a scant few centimeters between you.

You smile indulgently and snake a hand around the nape of his neck, your fingertips digging into the thick bone of the nuchal ridge where his skull curves to meet his spine. His soft blond hair catches between your fingers, the dark roots only barely beginning to show at his scalp, and Gods, you aren’t _intellectually_ upset with him, it was a fair and pithy comment on the role reversal underway, but it’s so strange to you, that he would _like_ this, _want_ this, court it actively when you could have had him halfway through his second orgasm, by now, if he’d shut his mouth and let you lay him down and tend to him rather than - what’s he even playing at?

You’re not kinkshaming.

It just doesn’t make any sense to you, viscerally. You love him, and you’re doing this because you love him, you’d have every excuse not to, you started this as much as he did, but.

His gaze is warm and admiring, his lips soft and parted willingly as you manhandle him, grind his mouth sloppily against the outline of your erection, use him like a toy for stroking yourself off, your trousers still buttoned and the fabric still between you, his skin warm through it, his breath hot and quick as he gasps and _glows_ like this is doing something for him.

Not just doing something. You’re familiar with being used, and there’s a satisfaction to it. But his expression is all love. Love, love, love, he’s feeling love from this. He’s not a good enough actor to fake even an ounce of the sincerity shining, amber backlit, in his dark eyes.

You feel the weight of his love in his acquiescence, and somehow he feels yours through your command. Is it love? You have no real bearings from which to think about it, to sort through all the conceptual confusion, not with him tonguing wetly at your piercings through the thin layer of black cloth. And you’re half-in-character, and there’s no easy box for this, because you’ve never really done this before, not for _real_ , not so thoroughly, not without doing it specifically for his pleasure, the act has always come at someone’s behest, because they lust for this sort of thing, but Dirk _loves_ you, and you believe that, so… so…

So you tug him away by the hair, regard the slick of his reddened lips, the color to his face.

“Hands on your knees,” you tell him. “I have no patience for flippancy. You won’t be touching yourself tonight. Be good for me and perhaps I’ll deign to use your cock for something more constructive than making a sticky mess of your thighs. Seems as though you can do that part well enough on your own, hm?”

The words come easily. Lies, the same way all stories are lies, but these make his head loll slightly in your grip, as he exhales on a low groan and complies, putting his hands in view. And the truth is that you wanted him to do that, and your words communicated it perfectly, so is it really such a bad thing?

“Good,” you murmur, gentling your grip on his hair just a tad as you deftly throw off your belt and open your trousers. There’s something you could do in your sleep.

You ease him in, hold him close enough to feel the warmth of his skin, but not quite touching you, until his tongue pokes out to nudge at the thick gold ring protruding from the slit at the tip of your dick.

“That’s it,” you say, stroking lightly at his hair with your thumb while still maintaining your grip. “You know what you’re good for, pretty thing, and it’s not _out-talking me_. Open up.”

You’re careful about slipping inside of his mouth. Usually, you would spare a moment to take your piercings off, but he’d object if he didn’t want it as it is, quick and raw and brutal, without a second’s consideration for his teeth. You move slowly, but brusquely, your hips stationary, forcing his head down rather than thrusting in. The first few centimeters are easy, his mouth is lax and accommodating and blissfully warm, the slide a delicious relief, a hot static of sated arousal.

Dragging him down further, the tight resistance of his throat shifts the gold in your achingly hard erection. You permit yourself a quick inhale - it’s _good_ , it’s been a horribly long time since you gave this particular urge any attention - and he full-on moans around you, struggling to suck you deeper, to swallow you, though you haven’t given him any room to do so. His eyes briefly flicker up to take in your parted lips, fluttering lashes, but it’s over before you can amp it up a bit for his enjoyment, and you resume stroking yourself off with his skull.

The velvety, all-over heat and wet and alive-feeling of his mouth, as he tongues at you, is overwhelmingly pleasurable, threatens to be over too quickly. You pull him off of you with a wet _pop_ as he tries to keep your dick in his mouth, a click of gold on his teeth finally forcing him to let go, breathing heavily, his chin slick with spit.

You dry his face with your free hand, playing with his lips, squeezing his cheeks together to force his mouth open again to ensure there’s been no damage, nothing chipped. You’ve been very mindful, of course, and he is fully intact.

As you will yourself back from the edge, you find yourself looking for any indication that he would like a way out. There’s none, not a whisper of anything but almost dreamy reverence, the weight of his head still resting in your hand, his neck lax as he pants for air and waits for you to make further use of him. You want to ask if he’s okay, but you know the answer, and you know how little you can trust any answer but a panicked one, in this sort of situation. It’s hard to even ask to stop, to answer a question _about_ stopping, to do anything about the momentum of an act, until it is untenably unpleasant, and even then, punishingly difficult.

Perhaps not for him. Save for coughing a little on a mouthful of saliva, Dirk is doing nothing short of gazing up at you like you hung the moon in the heavens.

Without warning, you shove him back down, harder, this time, knowing a little better what you’re doing, where you fit, how much he can take. Warm, again, the heat of him pooling in your stomach, filling as a meal, sweet and heavy as lead.

He’s swallowing in earnest, now, his throat clenching in hot pulses around you, and you get it, why this might compel a God into his service, then swiftly stop thinking about that before jealousy can sink its needle-sharp claws into your heart.

The self-distraction doesn’t entirely work. He’s yours. No one else’s, no one else can have him or this or anything, how could he possibly understand how special he is, how special this is, how no one else could make you feel the way he does, no one else could be this to you, _no one_?

You dig your fingers into his hair, and he moans, then chokes on the moan, but recovers his tempo quickly as you thrust into him in earnest.

“Isn’t this better?” you say, evening out your tone as much as you can. Of course, you can’t hide the fact that each stroke, every fluttering twitch of his throat and flick of his tongue is bringing you closer to climax. “So much easier - when you don’t fight me, precious thing, when you let me use you as you’re meant to be used, _ah_ -”

The words continue to stream out on their own, his eyes beading with tears but no less reverential for it as you haul him in so his nose is flush with your pelvic ring, hold him there for a long second, rocking into the spasms his throat makes, trying to swallow or expel you, and pull him away again as you feel yourself climax, semen oozing down the gold of your ring, dripping down his lips as he coughs and sputters but obediently keeps his mouth open until you’re done.

With your free hand, you go in to clean him off, but change your mind, smearing it over his lower lip untidily instead and leaning in to examine your handiwork. His chest heaves as he slowly regathers himself, steadies his breathing. You tilt his face from side to side, admiring the way he glistens as much as the way he allows you to do so.

“Clean yourself up,” you say, releasing his hair. He slumps a little, at first, but straightens quickly. There’s a moment where you can see him considering removing his hands from his thighs and doing it that way, but under your appraisal, he carefully licks his rubbed-raw lips until there’s only much-abused, spit-slick flesh.

You do, however, brush the tears from his eyes with a dry fingertip and sweep his bangs from his face, where sweat has beaded despite the chill of the room and his nakedness.

While you’re feeling warmed and satisfied, perfunctorily tucking yourself back into your trousers, easily done, he’s still tense as a longbow ready to fire, his nails sunk deep enough into his bare thighs to draw a trickle of blood. You ruffle his hair, and he presses his head against your hand, as much of a plea as he can express without leaving his position or speaking.

“You’re an utter wonder,” you say quietly. “My kingdom for your mouth, any damn day of the week. And such a docile fellow, aren’t you, once you’re shown your place. In my lap, now, you’ve done very well.”

Sitting at the foot of the bed, you help him up, not minding too much that his inner thighs are liberally slicked up; you won’t have to wear these trousers again, and you like it very much, his being naked and wound up as a spring while you’re relaxed and clearly in command of what’s happening, his back flush with your chest, most of his weight supported by your body, his legs splayed out over your lap.

You sink your teeth into his neck and your fingers into him, and he gasps and jerks within your hold on his chest. His dick is hard, and he’s open and easy with pent-up arousal of his own, almost overreactive when you stroke the length of him, over and over again, with two fingers thrusting inside of him. You know his body, and you know to keep palming him, pressing your fingertips up to meet the slick drag of external stimulation with every thrust, past his shuddering descent into orgasm.

Sucking bruises into the tender skin of his throat, you don’t so much as slow your pace, keeping at it mercilessly, and you have him to the brink again in minutes, clenching around your fingers and moaning his helpless pleasure.

He’s a real sight, his neck bruised purple, his thighs absolutely drenched. You hold him where he is for a long moment, letting him recover, stroking his bloody and cummed-up thigh, pressing butterfly-soft kisses to the nape of his neck until his chest is moving steadily and he’s holding himself up.

At some point, the water-sounds in the bathroom have abated.

“About those nightclothes,” you say gently, and he laughs, and you can feel him think about shoving you, but he doesn’t. Just climbs down, jelly-legged, and returns to the task of sorting through the trunks.

Roxy, utter lamb of a woman that she is, must have taken her time soaking, and by the time she returns to the main room, Dirk is decent and back on your lap, in one of the comfortably plush chairs, eyes closed and head resting on your shoulder as you play with his hair and pet him like the world’s most deadly lapdog.

“Cuties,” she observes, then bows politely and settles under the sheets. Spread-eagled, she doesn’t cover half of it. You can think of worse fates than sharing a bed with Roxy, and now your priority has shifted to preparing for sleep.

Curious whether it’s gotten easier, you hike Dirk up in your arms rather than making him walk, and he makes a fussy grumbling noise into the side of your neck but doesn’t argue as you scoop him up and stand.

It’s no misapprehension, you’ve definitely gotten strong enough to cart him around without wobbling on your feet like a toddler on stilts of raw spaghetti. So there’s a mark in the plus column, regarding your changing build.

The bathing room is cavernous and fairly dark, illuminated only by an array of candles and lanterns in wall sconces. Roxy’s emptied and rinsed out the tub, and you set Dirk on the raised-up granite rim of the massive thing and fiddle with the weird pump-thingy until you get it streaming out steamy-hot water. It’s clear, and mostly doesn’t have a smell, which is odd. You wonder if it’s pumped in from the river, and how they keep enough heated that it can fill the tub.

The square pool-ish tub is carved of what might have been one enormous block of granite, thick cut but filed down to a glistening sheen, the walls uniform except for a single headrest, carved out of the same block of lilac granite, which promises a fairly comfortable bolster for your head to one end of the enormous fixture. It’s hard to believe that such a capacious tub was constructed for only one person. Yours, back at home in Aetria, certainly wasn’t.

With the door closed behind you and Dirk gamely removing the pajama pants he only just put on, you set about the far more arduous task of unfastening and folding your heavy cape, extricating yourself from the tight red satin doublet without catching the fabric on your nipple piercings, and getting your boots off and your trousers with them. The room is steamy by the time you’re done, the stone slick and cool beneath your toes. The water is all-encompassingly loud as it flows torrentially from the hand-pump.

Dirk still sits at the rim, watching the tub fill and inspecting a vial of bath salts and a pat of flowery looking soap. You sidle in next to him, dipping your toes a bit and finding it just slightly too hot, hopefully an easy adjustment once you’re actually in.

“Thinkin’ rosemary for good luck,” he comments, his voice soft and hoarse and nearly inaudible beneath the sound of the water rushing in, holding up the little soap cake for you to inspect. “Don’t know what the other flower is, but fuck, it’ll be great to smell nice again.”

You lean in to have a look, and he freezes. You follow his gaze, confused for a fraction of a second, down to your neck.

Oh, right. You forgot. How the fuck did you forget? The _immulatio_ suddenly feel constrictingly tight.

With the water-noises as a cover, tired as you are and late as it is, you don’t immediately have an excuse or an explanation or an act. Explaining it gets more complicated every time you learn something new about yourself, and you haven’t even had time to process _any_ of the last few things that have happened.

“Are you mad at me?” you ask quietly, dropping any pretense of not being your own pitiful present-self. “I’m sorry, really, I thought so many times about how to tell you, but I got nervous and I didn’t, and… I have my reasons, you know, I promise I do.”

His eyebrows tell the story for him, doubtful, wounded. He exhales, and it’s a frustrated sound, but when you lean in solicitously, he meets your temple in a soft kiss.

“I don’t know what I was expecting,” he sighs.

Fuck it, you’re not too burned out to turn on the charm. You make cartoonishly fluttery eyes at him, hoping to make him laugh. He doesn’t, but he does kiss you again, on the cheek.

“We’ll have to stop being all chatty when the water’s off. At least about important stuff,” you say. “So if you’ve something to say… say it.”

“I’m not mad,” he says. “Seriously. Just tired. I said I was on your side, hell or high water, alright? I love you. I fucking worry. That’s all. Get in the tub, bro, I’ve got some more servant dude schtick in me before we pass out for the night.”

“You actually are very bad at this,” you whisper. “The insubordination of ordering _me_ around…”

“Shut the fuck up and get soaking, _your grace_ ,” he retorts softly. The set of his mouth is resolute as ever, his expression affectedly disapproving, but his eyes are sad.

It twists a knife in your chest that you didn’t know was in there. You hate the thought that you’ve disappointed him, somehow. That he believed that you were better than needing them, even though you clearly aren’t, even though it’s all so muddled up and complicated, more so with every passing day, every passing thought, that you can’t even hope to keep track of it all. Stories, even true ones, demand a tidiness and linearity that is _always_ a lie.

The water is much warmer than the ambient temperature, but not boiling, and not bad at all once you get used to it. Dirk turns off the water before it gets too high in the tub, and busies himself with a selection of herbal salts and the aforementioned soap. You expect him to get in with you, but he doesn’t.

Leaning back on the headrest, you feel his hands, cool and damp with steam, on your face. He traces up the bridge of your nose, and you wonder, for a moment, what he’s up to, until you feel metal shift beneath your skin and realize he’s unscrewing the barbell in your bridge. He’s moved on to your ear before you can think of why you might object. And you don’t, not really, it’s just a little confusing. You’re really, really good at cleaning around them, and you’re not big on taking them off too often. Easy to get lost, and you’d’ve been in heaps of trouble if one went missing for some reason, so you’ve made a habit of it. They only come out when it’s particularly rough on the water and you worry about getting tossed around in your sleep.

A steaming bath is hardly a perilously rocking ship. You lean back languorously and stretch into the not-feeling-feeling of the long-healed punctures, his fingertips over them, metal sliding inside them. How long has it been since you took _all_ of them off?

Not for a long time. He kisses the shell of each ear as he finishes, and lays your jewelry on a fluffy towel beside the tub. Your head feels bizarrely light without all of that gold.

His hands find your lips, and he tenderly opens your mouth, unscrews your snakebites, works his way over your tongue. These you’ve had for a decade, and you should be fine to take them out for a day or two, but you never have. You’re very, very still as he works, not knowing what to make of it, not disliking it enough to take it up with him.

Climbing in, he straddles you with the slightest wince, and he kisses you chastely as he removes the barbells from each of your nipples in turn. He ignores the _immulatio_ , reaching down and searching out your dick, immensely cautious as he removes these, too, one by one, the ring in your pelvis last.

You’ve been holding your breath, and you exhale all at once when it’s out, set carefully on the towel with all the others.

In all likelihood, you look incredibly silly. You wouldn’t have any idea just how much, though, would you? Haven't seen yourself without them since... you're not sure when. Certainly not since you came of age, which was when you got the trade-issue ornaments of the _caro supellecta_ , despite graduating to training as a _litgamella_ rather than the formalized service of one household or another, like all the rest of your age cohort. And realizing that those weren't so bad as you'd been dreading, you went ahead and did your lips to match, and got a few extra in your tongue for the showmanship of it, and that was fine, too, and the rest is history. Most, you picked out yourself. They made you look a little older, and you needed all the help you could get with that.

You’re sure you look plain and likely a bit deformed without them, your lobes stretched by years of gauging and your face full of little holes. These days, you're no longer freshly-named and easily transfigured into something new, healed or punched through, elastic and adaptable and eager to learn, not yet having figured out how miserable 'learning' can be.

Even with his body on top of yours, you're weightless in the water, unmoored. Even in a tub deep enough to drown in.

The candleflames and sconce-lanterns make his purplish bruises look black against his skin. But it’s your turn, now, to pale under the intensity of his scrutiny. He continues to kiss you, sweetly, possessively. Picks up the little piece of soap and lathers up your hair, your face, your neck, minus the part beneath the band, which he doesn’t touch. It’s hard to see his face properly, so close and without your reading glasses. So you simply tip your head back and return the kiss, let your hands rest on his hips and his tongue run over yours, a gentle push-pull as you match his attentions. The feeling, without your piercings, is alien.

You sink below the water to rinse off, and he holds you, and the firelight flickers above the surface of the water, and you only sputter a little bit as you remind yourself to breathe again, that you aren’t dead, aren’t drowned, that this is all finite, anyway, that this mission will _end_ and you and he will be off to greater things, brilliant adventures, so many beautiful things to see and ways to touch and love each other.

“I love you,” he says, kissing your cheek, barely more than a breath. You could’ve imagined it.

“I love you,” you reply, unhesitating. You don’t know what makes you say it, precisely, but you’re overwhelmed with something, like you almost always are, with him.

Roxy is already quite unconscious when you return to the main room, the tub emptied and the candles extinguished. Dirk takes a moment to attend to the lanterns, and to turn a dial that lowers the light from the overhead fixture to nothing. It’s dark, except for the watery silver light of the moon.

You slip into a soft shirt and shorts, your piercings all back in place, the metal still warm, and snuggle in. He joins you in a moment. You forget any criticism of the bed and its linens altogether; it’s wonderful, curled up in his arms, the sounds of him and Roxy breathing nearby, the knowledge that they’re protecting you. Any version of you would have been delighted, reassured, appetites all sated, clean and warm and secure in the arms of the man you love.

Tomorrow will come whenever it does, and bring whatever it brings, and you will be ready for it.


	16. Not Today! [Instrumental] (or, Aetrian Variation)

Though it takes you a while to drift off - you’re still thinking about the white light that was visible as you approached on the sea, and it’s like you can see it, almost, even with your eyes squinched shut - the combination of the chilly room and the warm bed have you settling into unconsciousness despite the pale haze you can’t blink away. 

It’s white like Dualscar’s melted-wax face, like the teeth of the Ampora fellow Kanaya sliced in half, the whitewashed corpse-boats in the Court, Jade’s starlight magyyks, the enormous pearl bathed in the refulgence of the ornate chandelier, the imagined patina of mother’s skull, on a shelf somewhere, clean and empty.

Against all odds, you fall asleep. And you don’t dream. At least, nothing you can remember.

You wake up to a weight on your ribcage, limiting your breathing slightly, though you’re too cozy to mind much. Some time in the night, both Dirk and Roxy have snuggled closer, and while Dirk is practically laying across your chest, thoroughly hogging the real estate, she’s happily nestled in the crook of your arm. It’s still very dark, but enough indigo-blue light passes hazily through the window to cast faint shadows.

At sea, you grew familiar with these slow winter mornings, and they’re even more gradual this far north. The sun takes hours to so much as breach the horizon, protracted stretches of eerie not-quite-light at dusk and dawn that swallow up much of the day. Dualscar did say ‘sunrise’, didn’t he? That won’t be for a while.

The white light, which had been itching like a grain of sand caught beneath your eyelid, is forgotten. Dirk’s eyelashes are still, blue-washed as the rest of him in the dim illumination. From this angle, you have a prime view of his truly dire bruises, running from his earlobe to his clavicle, developed even more obviously than they were in the flickering lanternlight in the bath. You have to consciously not wince, hoping that it doesn’t hurt too much. These _are_ the sort that stay sore for a good long while, require at least a week off to heal to a visually acceptable level, though the ache can linger well past that. Teeth marks. Yikes.

It’s not your neck, though, it’s his, and your neck doesn’t hurt at all, so you put it from your mind immediately in favor of other considerations. Roxy is comparatively inoffensive to look at, serene in sleep, and smells like a bouquet of foreign wildflowers. You pull her in closer, nestle more deeply into the down-stuffed blanket, and lapse back into comfortable unconsciousness.

When you wake up again, the sun is barely any closer to rising, but you get the sense that time has passed. Dirk is gone, his spot in the bed only a little warm when you search him out with grasping fingers. You can hear him puttering around in the bathroom, filling a basin, brushing his teeth. You make a protest-y noise that he almost definitely can’t hear and bury your face in Roxy’s hair. She wakes up, laughing, and you stretch your legs out in the way you can’t while you’re sleeping in a hammock and hug her properly.

“You’re doing an amazing job, just a heads up,” you murmur against the side of her head, playing it off as a kiss.

“Don’t I know it,” she replies sleepily. “Keep the compliments coming, your grace!”

“Greedy,” you chide, snuggling up - she's much softer than Dirk, very good for a certain kind of snuggling - though you're interrupted as her hair tickles your nose and you nearly sneeze. She must have fallen asleep still bath-damp, and now her blonde mop is all over the place, practically windswept. Much as you revel in the coziness and distinct _stability_ of the bed, you miss lazing around on deck with her and Aradia. You’ve gotten so comfortable with touching them, normal-ways. “But you deserve all of them. Someone has to keep their head, and I don’t suppose it’s going to be Dirk. For my part, I think I’m a lost cause.”

“The lostest,” she agrees, wriggling down and tugging the covers over her head. “It’s colllld.”

You chuckle at her antics and settle back against the pile of soft pillows, your heart aching only slightly at the thought of Aradia left alone on the much colder ship. Vriska and Kanaya, too, wherever they’ve ended up. Oh, you hope you’re not going to walk into the great hall and find them strung up or something awful like that, though you can’t imagine things going anywhere near that wrong. Not without Vriska blowing up half the castle on her way down, and that would likely have woken you.

Part of maintaining your character is not even thinking about them too much. You breathe deeply, steadily, let your mind clear as much as it can of everything but the present, and slowly reintroduce yourself to who you’re supposed to be. Thought by thought, you reopen boxes and bring out the previous evening, the marionette of your six-months-ago self, the right sentiments. The urgency of getting home, but also the anxiety that would’ve driven you to waffle about it, the need to do it _right_ or not at all, the acute awareness of being scrutinized by no one less than yourself.

There are only two people who actually matter, two players, two sets of competing priorities to weigh against each other. Dualscar’s ambitions, which you intend to clarify, to build yourself a better mental model of the fellow. His methods, his desires, his resources. And then there’s you, and everything you have, and everything you want. And that’s all.

You pack everything else away and focus on being this version of yourself, wholly enough that your hands will stay still when you answer questions as him. Se pamo si Il Ripato English a patra Harley Jake. Once upon a time, it wasn’t a lie, and it won’t be now. So far, so good.

Toweling his face dry, Dirk returns to the main body of the room, already dressed, practically with his boots on. You frown exaggeratedly until he takes notice.

“Turn the light on and come back to bed,” you tell him.

“As his grace commands.” Back to that, then, down to business. For the best, too, because you haven’t been giving enough thought to setting the stage for today’s agenda.

After finagling the overhead candelabra to a low setting, he rejoins you on the bed, and you stare up at the ceiling, brow still furrowed. A tour of the estate and grounds. You’re just fantastically interested in that church, in the as-of-yet unexplained white light phenomena, in anything to do with the occult or the sanctified or the supernatural. You’ll have to lead him into that discussion, beliefs and that sort of thing, and while you’re ready to utterly bamboozle the fellow with Aetrian cultural and religious history, you’ll want to do so in a manner that prompts him to reciprocate the disclosure.

What insight do you have, here? What did he like talking about last night? He wanted your story - easily done. It would be convenient if you could get him to fill in some of the blanks in the existing story _you_ have for _him_ , those seafaring days he mentioned. How he survived half his face getting torn clean off, by someone’s _teeth_ , no less, a recipe for a fatal infection even if he somehow endured the blood loss. Kanaya was clever with her placing, would have critically compromised some major blood vessels, and even if he didn’t bleed out, infection ought to have reached his brain in a matter of days if not hours. What _is_ that grotesque fleshy mask, anyway?

It’s a sensitive sort of question to just whip out and get to asking, but it’s a reasonable goal for the day. Setup and follow-through. Figure out the face and go to sleep tonight with a clearer picture of how to get the rest, assuming the church doesn’t bear out.

The _face_ has got to be a big ticket item. With it, you’ll have vital insight as to his horrible perfidious slaving past and the route that led him here, his physician or healer or… whatever, and definitely that church. Those peculiarly old serving-people. It’s all very, very odd. You can hardly even begin to speculate about what the shit is going on with Ms. Bronya and the many others thus far unnamed.

“What do the two of you think of Lord Ampora’s staff, hm?” you wonder aloud, remembering that you have two excellent alternate perspectives at your disposal. You _have_ established yourself as the kind of fellow who takes the word of his indentured servants rather more seriously than most in your position might.

“Hmmm,” Roxy says, wriggling back up to join you with a sigh at the loss of her cocoon of blanket-warmth. “They’re some kinda loyal, that’s for sure.”

Very tactful way to put it. Layers to the observation. _Some_ kind of loyal. What a bother, to have to execute these sorts of talks as though you’re all on display. Just in case.

Dirk just snorts in derision. You nod thoughtfully in response, like this has contributed something to the conversation.

“The two of you might have some luck, getting to know them a tad, figuring out the lay of the land, as it were,” you suggest. “I’ll be very busy today with his Lordship, but if you’re willing to surrender the weapons for a while, it might be really helpful if you’d get in the weeds and help me get a sense of how much I can trust the fellow, via his servingpeople. It’d be such a shame to get taken for a fool, I mean, after being successfully hornswoggled so very many times in the process of getting here.”

While Roxy is already nodding along, her expression gone calculating, Dirk stiffens as soon as you suggest giving up the belt full of swords, or perhaps just at the thought of leaving you and Dualscar to your own devices. You nudge him with your shoulder.

“Speak up, then, have you any concerns about our generous host?”

He grimaces.

“We were going to stick with you,” he says flatly.

“Really, dear heart of mine, what do you imagine is going to happen? Sincerely, since I know you’ve been giving the fellow just as much of a gander as I have, I want to know if there’re alarm bells ringing in that lovely noggin. Because to me, walking around sightseeing with a stuffy septuagenarian doesn’t sound remotely _exciting_ , let alone _dangerous_.”

“Nothing… fresh,” he admits. “But that doesn’t mean _nothing_ , dude.”

“How about we see how you feel after breakfast, hm? If you’re still nursing this silly cacoethes about my being at risk, I’ll see about bringing you along with for our negotiate-y proceedings and whatnot. I just worry it’ll be dreadfully boring, sitting on your hands and looking pretty with your blades while we wheel and deal. And I don’t want to have to hold things up to explain what’s going on to you, or deter him from being fully _open_ through the presence of an unknown quantity such as yourself.”

You’d just as soon not have to do this with the evil old bastard leering at your beloved and your Roxy. ‘Leering’ is sort of an uncharitable word for it, but you admittedly do know what he’s capable of, and you’re not inclined to cut the man any slack. And you hate to admit it, but you’re worried Dirk might trip you up at some point, might… well, if you have to tell a real whopper of a lie, or just… more truth than he knows, yet, about you and about everything. His being there would make you nervous, for that. High stakes make it harder to fight the telltale tremors in your hands. Dirk’s opinion of you is the highest stake there can be.

It could be very uncomfortable, explaining your courtly role to Dualscar in such a way as to encourage him to… you’re not sure, yet, but you want to keep your options open, see if you can get him curious. People get more loose-lipped when they’re hot under the collar. If that’s an angle you can play easily, well, you’ve got it made, you can have this whole thing sorted out in a day or two. Didn’t Kanaya say she thought he might have interest in you? And isn’t her knowledge of the fellow just as horribly intimate as knowledge gets?

Very reluctantly, Dirk yields to a few more reassurances about ‘playing it by ear’ and some blithe nonsense about how overwhelmed you are, thus far, by the kindness and generosity on display, and wasn’t it so nice how he let you keep the weapons in the first place, and how you adored how easily he was willing to relent on the ‘servants permitted to eat what they cooked’ issue, and golly gee, you _must_ learn the means by which that tub apparatus gets the water hot so quickly!

So far, you are confident that even if someone was watching as a bug in your ear, at very worst, they might realize that Dirk knows more Common than you’ve been letting on, which would be an eminently justifiable strategic lie for anyone in your position. Might also notice that you don’t do much kissing or ordering around of Roxy, but well, perhaps you wore her out on the ship and you’re letting her rest up for next time.

“Tocci avvirarse benio,” you tell him with a saccharine smile and an air of deep conviction.

“Na focciane,,” he retorts. You’d regret teaching him profanities if it wasn’t so hilarious to hear him say them aloud, heh.

“I thought that was what you were for,” you say, laughing, and roll over on top of him.

Roxy only puts up with this for so long, and even the molasses-slow sunrise imposes a time limit. Eventually, there is washing and tidying and dressing to do, all the easier for the fact that Roxy helps you with it. Dirk is entirely clueless about clothing, but she is pretty helpful.

Since you’ve been tentatively offered a tour of the grounds, you dress for practicality, as much as you can within acceptable princely conventions. Sturdy woolen trousers and a waist-length coat, both fitted beautifully and both in shades of grey, over an appropriately floofy white silk shirt, gathered at the wrists and high neck. You have Roxy leave most of the top buttons unbuttoned. Even with the jacket and everything closed up, your immulatio are on full display, and when you wear the coat unbuttoned, someone with a mind to look might catch a glint of gold just below your precariously loose neckline.

You re-wear your lovely boots from the previous night, though you wish you had better shoes for showing off the anklets, as well. You’re expecting the immulatio to do some of the conversation-starting and intrigue-building for you, and it’s spectacularly strange to be tip-tapping around in fancy shoes _indoors_ , on perfectly walkable granite.

Dirk and Roxy agree when you grumble about this, so you’re modestly reassured to learn that at least some Dersian subcultures are not totally barking _bananas_ about inside-shoes rules. Not that you would’ve worn them outside, either, but some common ground is nice.

As the sun peeks over the horizon, the barest sliver of gold in a cloudy sea of grey-blue, you swirl out of the room with your pals in tow, ready to take on the world and anyone in it. You’ve a sword on your hip (Dirk has two) and a pistol on the other (Roxy has _several_ ) and this is probably the least freaked out you have ever been by the prospect of carting weapons around as though you might use them.

When you arrive at the massive dining hall, not without some mis-turns and moments of confusion, it’s as though no time has passed at all from the previous night. No windows to interrupt or detract from that same brilliant illumination, the beautiful chandelier, the coruscating white light so bright that it might as well be mid-afternoon, though a remarkably _sparkly_ mid-afternoon.

You’re going to demand that he trade you for the chandelier, among other things, you decide. It’s the perfect stalling tactic; even if he agrees, it would take an outrageous amount of time to pack it up and get it loaded without snapping any of those intricate gold branches.

The table is already laid out with breakfast on your arrival, and the entrance you make sends two servants you sort of recognize from the kitchen staff lineup the previous night skittering off to fetch Dualscar as Dirk pulls out your chair for you.

Slightly early as you are, the food is freshly placed and undeniably excellent. One plate is piled with cold smoked salmon arranged in a flower shape around a soft, spreadable cheese full of fresh herbs. Another holds butter-soaked brown bread, steaming hot and still with a kind of crusty feel to it when you serve yourself a bit. More fish, white and somewhat slimy looking, though you gamely portion yourself a serving. Poached eggs float in a tureen of tomato-y stew, rich with cooked-down greens and vegetables. Finally, the big ticket item: a gorgeous platter of citrus fruits. Peeled grapefruit, oranges, little key limes, lemons carved into flowers, some kind of massive but definitely citrusy thing about the size of your head.

You’re struck with the thought that whoever prepared the fruits is probably not very well acquainted with them. The small, round, thin-skinned limes are absolutely not something that is typically just picked up and eaten. They’re more for marinades and pastries and tart winter beverages. In tea, their flavor indicates that the other notes ought to be read as a challenge or insult. And does _anyone_ eat peeled grapefruit? You’re not sure you’ve ever even seen, or wanted to see, a peeled grapefruit. It’s a bit like unexpectedly witnessing an old family friend who you never imagined even _having_ a naked body in the nude.

So you go ahead and portion out some of everything, though you turn to Roxy to ask her whether Derse usually has grapefruit, or is this some kind of bizarre anomaly?

The doors through which Lord Ampora entered the previous night swing open before you have the chance. Dersian custom dictates that you ought to stand at the entrance of your superior. Roxy hops up immediately, and you nudge Dirk with your boot until he does the same, but you remain seated.

“Good morning, your Lordship,” you say brightly, as he flicks a hand to dismiss his attendants and presumably to indicate that your coterie ought to be seated. “I do hope that the timing of my visit didn’t compromise your respite?”

“Good morning to you, Prince English. I appreciate your concern; there was no inconvenience to me, though I might have lost a moment’s rest wondering at your satisfaction with your accommodations.”

“You’re a spectacular host, Lord Ampora, rest assured, I found nothing lacking and everything quite overwhelmingly impressive. I wasn’t aware that Derse had yet managed the trick of… indoor plumbing? Color me surprised!”

He laughs politely, two attendants pulling out his seat as he joins you at the table with a flourish of cape and epaulettes. Different from the previous night, but very stylistically consistent.

“Yes, I’ve always made an effort to keep the Estate on the forefront of new technological developments. I’ve a number of skilled craftsmen in my staff. We source both water and power from the river. It’s quite a strategic boon in a number of ways, if you’ll pardon my allusion to my business with your countrypeople.”

“Ah, certainly, you’re in command of quite the stronghold, here! The second Jane claps eyes on this place, I just know she’ll be in love. Especially with the welcome wagon you roll out, good heavens! Dirk, beloved, since we’re on the subject of business - oh, dear, that’s a lot of multi-syllable words, he has trouble with those -  derio le direttiva, vic grata, per la vipote Dominari Ampora.”

He frowns at you for a second, parsing through your words, then produces the still-sealed letter from his sleeve. It’s rather sad-looking, after presumably being rained on while shown to the Dersian boarding crew, but the seal is intact.

“Ise brava, beva, bvelia ragaccia,” you say glowingly, then turn back to Dualscar before you can really get a bead on his response. “I don’t know exactly how much dear Mister Eridan has communicated on my behalf, I figure it might be as propitious a moment as any to formalize my intentions?”

You slide the letter across the table quite suavely if you do say so yourself.

“Eridan,” he chuckles, taking the parchment in hand. He is, you are reminded, a very, very large fellow. You’re no slouch yourself on this count, but his mitt basically envelopes the thing. “I must admit, I continue to struggle to comprehend how he managed to deliver a guest such as yourself to my doorstep.”

“Ah, there was another one,” you say, shrugging with an air of casual disinterest, as he inspects and then breaks the seal and begins to read. “A… Cronus? I think that was his name, per Eridan’s explanation of events. To his credit, it was he who found me almost immediately, but unfortunately did a wee bit too much threatening for the liking of the pirate I’d hired as an escort in the Court. Miss Aradia, the captain of the ship that brought me here. I gather most of the piratey sort don’t have much affection for your family? She killed him quite savagely, basically on sight, it was rather horrifying.”

Dualscar sighs, setting aside the letter to put a ring-laden hand to his temple.

“That’s a great disappointment. I understood the risk, and that he could be impulsive, as is the wont of many younger men. While it isn’t wholly unexpected news, it’s a shame, nonetheless, to hear of my namesake’s death. I apologize for the trouble he caused you. It sounds as though he was overzealous in executing my will.”

“Perhaps, though enthusiasm is hardly a capital offense,” you say reassuringly, despite the fact that, at the time, and at present, you’re inclined to think the fellow got what was coming to him, and only wish you’d had the gumption or capacity to do it yourself, frankly. “I apologize for not thinking to inform you sooner; of course, I would understand completely if mourning were to delay our transaction.”

“Not at all,” he says, glancing back at the letter, his one eye roaming over it. You find it eerie, the white glass one that never moves, and have to keep reminding yourself that he can’t actually see you out of it. “I understand that you’ve come a long way. It will be my pleasure to assess what you have to sell and see about getting you back to Aetria, though I hope you’ll take full advantage of my hospitality for as long as you please, and fully acquaint and avail yourself of the resources at my disposal. There is no urgency from my end. All things are slowed by winter, including myself, unfortunately.”

“Rest assured, there’s not a stitch of exigency at work on my end, either, really! I don’t deeply fancy the idea of just jetting off to Aetria without enough time to stock up and chart a course, and I’ll probably need a larger ship, and a crew besides, anyway,” you begin. “And really, I’ve got some incredible artifacts, I kept them in reserve because there was just no way I’d see a fair price in the Court or just about anywhere else, but for someone with your knowledge and interest -”

“There’s no need to get ahead of ourselves,” he cuts in. “We’ll do our dealings in good time. For the moment, you are my guest, and a valued one at that. I deeply appreciate your confirmation of your identity and origin, though it was largely unnecessary. The Aetrians I’ve met thus far have been a _distinctive_ people, to say the least.”

“Heh, yes, that’d be us. Distinctive as anything,” you laugh. “I don’t suppose you remember who composed the delegation you met with? I might know a few names, though my involvement in such affairs was limited. We could swap gossip, though. I know my fair share of that.”

You set down your fork - you’ve been eating intermittently, the sort of small, neat, careful bites that were smacked into you as ‘appropriate’ when you were a child - and set your chin against your hand in a way that leaves a fingertip tracing over your immulatio. You’re not sure if he’d tip his hand just yet, so far as knowing what they mean and what you are, but that single purple-black eye does flick down and then back up, taking note of the accessory.

Shifting your shoulders within your coat, you make sure he gets just the slightest look at your piercings, too. With the level of scrutiny flowing in your direction, there’s no way he misses the gold flashing a few inches below the unbuttoned collar of your blouse.

“I’ll admit, the experience involved a fair amount of culture shock on my part,” he chuckles, back to looking you in the eye. “I’d expected a single negotiator, traveling with a staff. Six, I must concede, of equal decision-making weight, none of whom were ultimately willing to _make_ a decision, was rather a surprise. I’d exchanged a few pieces of correspondence with the Empress in advance of their arrival, and I’d been expecting someone more of her bearing, I suppose.”

“Oh, then you’d have surely been disappointed,” you say, smiling placidly. “There is no one of Jane’s bearing but Jane herself, it’s not even a close race. She is simply the best there is. By a hundred miles.”

“I’m inclined to agree, based on all I’ve heard from and of her thus far. Your elder sister?”

“Younger, by a few months,” you correct him. “Though it’s a very easy mistake to make. She has a way about her. Honestly, she’s a picture-perfect Empress in all respects. I just wish I hadn’t gotten whisked off before I got to see her come into her own. It was a beautiful coup on our part, but all her idea, of course. She’s the mastermind, I can’t even begin to claim otherwise. I’ll back her to my dying day, though, believe you me.”

“Succession must work differently in Aetria,” he notes, his eyebrow half-raised.

“I’m sure it does!” you agree. “I’ll be only too glad to detail the historical and mythic origins of our conventions, if you like. I do understand that we are rather unique in this and in many regards.”

“To be sure,” he says, and his gaze moves over to Dirk, then past you to Roxy, then back again. “Do both of your companions speak Aetrian?”

“Hah, that’s its own kind of long story!” you say, biting back a frown and the impulse to put yourself between him and Dirk, to demand what all the staring is about. The bruises, probably, those being fresh and still very noticeable over his collar. Fuck. You know it’s important that he see them, that he take them for incontrovertible evidence that you share his basic attitudes about the object-use of other people, but that doesn’t mean you have to _like_ his being allowed to imagine those things happening. “Though it abridges easily enough. Roxy, here, took to Common like a fish to water, but Dirk, this one, he’s got some hangups about the language on account of some horrific trauma or another, or perhaps just his own obstinacy, I can’t get a straight answer out of the fellow. He did, however, have some interest in Aetrian, and I’ve been teaching him as best I can. It’s quite a job, but it’s such a pleasure to hear my own tongue on another set of lips.”

“I would imagine,” he says politely. Still looking at Dirk. Curiosity gleaming in his eye. “I’ve a few books in my possession, though they don’t make especially good teachers.”

You want those books - actually, you _need_ those books - but you suppose you’ll wait until after he’s dead to pursue them. If you were going home, you wouldn’t need them, because you would have a whole beautiful library waiting for you.

“You’d really be better off with a human being,” you say, instead of what you are thinking, which is ‘I am going to see you slaughtered and then take all of your nice books’. “The fact is, it’s a very voice-y language. The obvious patterns of conjugation and the cognates, as well, are far more clear when spoken aloud than they are when written. We’ve only had a written lexicon, even, for the past few centuries.”

“Fascinating,” he says, no sign of insincerity in his tone or bearing, finally looking back at you. “Eridan, deliberately or not, did me a great service in directing you to me. I’m sure we’ll have plenty to discuss. The world is changing quickly, and I have a suspicion that those who fail to adapt to Aetrian custom will be left behind, at best.”

“Quite so! I’m honestly just as curious about the Dersian way of life. I hope you’ll forgive me if I have just as many questions for you, if not more. I don’t suppose I’ve ever met a Dersian nobleman such as yourself, and I am just _brimming_ with curiosity!”

“It will be my honor and my pleasure to sate that curiosity in every way possible,” he says smoothly, and you let yourself positively _glow_ in response, lean in over your plate with your biggest, sparkliest eyes.

“The pleasure, I’m certain, will be all mine,” you say, making eye contact through the dark fringe of your lashes. “Truly, good company has been wanting in my day-to-day existence, of late. And I’m sure I have much to learn from you, your Lordship. If I’m to be a steward of my country, in this brave new world of ours… I hope not to do it from a place of total ignorance.”

Dirk loudly sets down his fork and knife, but doesn’t say anything. You look over at him askance and find him glowering down at his plate.

Trying to will him to _chill the fuck out_ \- if you can do it, he can do it! - you put a hand on his thigh and resume smiling winsomely at Dualscar.

“So how about it?” you say, bright and airy as anything. “There are stories to tell, bargains to be explored, a hold full of priceless treasure awaits, and I haven’t taken in hide nor hair of the Estate beyond what I could see by night, with all the tragic limitations that implies. Make a suggestion, my good sir, and I will deny you nothing.”

You don’t need to see or feel anything of Dirk to know that he doesn’t like the sound of that one teensy bit, but you do, regardless, and the picture is a rather grim one.

“Do they ride?” Dualscar asks, indicating Dirk and Roxy with a nod.

“Like a dream,” you reply, then pause as though comprehension is dawning. “Oh, no, they’ve no equestrian background at all. Heh. Tragic though that is. That won’t be a problem, will it?”

“The grounds are substantial, and I would have you see for yourself just how advantageous our position truly is, here. How impenetrable and well-supplied. I do hope to be an asset to your Empress and to your empire, you understand.”

“Oh, gosh, I’d be over the moon for a chance to have a looksee about these fancy digs! I suppose we could find some way to keep my darlings busy while we’re off gallivanting about?”

Roxy pipes up immediately.

“I’ve worked in kitchens!” she announces, then gives you a wide-eyed, smiley, ‘did I do good?’ look. Once again proving herself a professional. You smile back indulgently.

“I can’t speak for our host,” you say. “But I would welcome the opportunity to share your talents.” You turn back to Dualscar. “Don’t let her guilt you into allowing it, of course, if you permit her to make faces at you for too long you’ll find yourself putty in her hands, though the experience is not an unpleasant one. It might be better than simply leaving them in the room, though. Unless you have other jobs that might need doing? I’ll gladly disarm them, too, in keeping with your typical practices, since I can’t account for their behavior in my absence.”

“The kitchenstaff would balk at a man working among them,” he notes, apparently contemplative. “How would your fellow fare in the stables? There’s certainly enough work to be done, and a strong back is quite sufficient for it.”

“He does have one of those, I can personally attest,” you laugh. “Alright, then. Lovely. I was so worried we would have to drag them along with us hither and thither, thank goodness. Can’t imagine how bored the poor things would be, hardly understanding every other word - it would just be cruelty.”

“A very conscientious consideration, Prince English.”

“That would be a first!” you laugh. “You’re magnanimous with your praise, Lord Ampora.”

It’s at this point you realize that while you’ve cleaned your plate, Dualscar, despite having served himself, has not so much as taken a bite of his food. He’s moved it around, certainly, been doing a real mime-job with the stuff, but it’s all still there.

Bronya from before and another woman whose dark hair is streaked with grey who he calls Lynera both appear at his summons. You continue to frown at his plate, then try to surreptitiously resume scoping out his face, flat-affect-smiley about it, without getting creeped out by the blank, dead eye in the blank, dead flesh, which always seems to be watching you. Hrrm.

Dirk, once again, tersely surrenders his armaments to the attendants at your command as Dualscar instructs them to escort Roxy to your quarters to disarm herself, to find something for her to do, and to treat her with a guest’s honor all the while. That’s good enough for you and seems good enough for her, as well. You kiss her on the cheek and send her on her way. She giggles more than once, and murmurs something in their language to Dirk as she passes him which seems to relax him incrementally.

“We’ll be bound for the stables first, regardless,” Dualscar notes, once she and the servants have disappeared.

You hope that the promise of Actual Horses and Horse Related Distraction might be enough to get Dirk back in gear about everything, but as you lead him down yet another corridor, flanked by two unfamiliar guardsmen, just a pace or two behind Dualscar, he seems only slightly less wound up than he was over breakfast.

“Vic, cavian. Se piane cavian.,” you say quietly.

“Se ba piami tocci,” he grumbles in reply.

At least you seem to be easing into a means of communicating discretely, and one that should make sense by Dualscar’s or anyone’s standards. That part, you’re pretty sure, went over very well, though you don’t like the thought that this might make him covet Dirk, who is _yours_.

Emerging into the courtyard, it’s very different in the diffuse grey light of day. The high wall is made of the same lavender granite, and the castle, when you glance up behind you, seems even larger when you can actually see it up close. The craggy peaks of mountains in the distance, visible past the wall but only barely, are mist-shrouded and grey and bleak as anything. You are not relishing the prospect of this tour.

Based on the level of rigid, exhausting back-and-forth formality thus far, and the promise of much more of it if you are to get to the point where he’ll show you the church and tell you anything else interesting in a reasonable timeframe, this stands to be the most dreadfully dull diplomatic mission ever. Even with the promise of murder and mayhem and the underlying thread of subterfuge! 

There are many brutal aspects of Dersian culture, one of which, you are increasingly convinced, is the stuffy banality of its hosting conventions.

Aetria is very different. While there are no foreign dignitaries to entertain, each local government and principality, for the most part, has their own local leadership body. Entertaining each other and wheeling and dealing and all that is a sizable portion of their fairly limited responsibilities. You knew, going into this, that it was unlikely that you were going to encounter a spectacularly decadent party staffed by scantily clad litgamella and the household’s caro supellecta in full regalia, but, well, you’ve never gotten to experience that sort of thing from the guest side rather than the staffing side, and a fellow can dream, right?

The prospect of being shown around a property, and then another, smaller property within the property, is actually so fucking dreary that you can feel your brain threatening to melt out of your ears. Jane might enjoy it, even if she weren’t planning to kill the man doing the walking-around and explaining, but kind of the only real challenge thus far has been Dirk’s obstinance. While there’s a lot of information to be gathered, much to learn, whatever whatever etcetera etcetera, you’re already dreading the amount of passive listening and feigning interest you’re going to have to do over the next few hours. Even mental chess isn’t nearly as fun as feeding people grapes and being ogled.

You’re not actually sure being ogled properly by Lord Ampora would even be a remotely pleasant experience, what with the face thing. But that’s just another boring aspect of the whole affair!

At least you have your background fact-finding objective, and so you steel yourself and follow him and his attendants to an adjoining building within the grounds, similarly made of stone, though without glass windows or much of the finery of the castle.

A soft pink muzzle pokes out from one of those open windows, whuffling curiously, and you nearly exclaim in delight.

Horses! Oh, right, you like those too! Suddenly, the next few hours sound a lot more enjoyable.

“Are you a horseman, Lord Ampora?” you ask, with unabashed enthusiasm. This is a thing that you sincerely like to talk about, and that you would really like to meet some horses. All of the horses. Immediately.

“In a sense. My father was a true equestrian, had a passion for the things. Bred and sold some fine animals. These are the descendents of those stock.”

“Oh, gracious, well, you must tell me all about them! Could I be introduced? How many do you have? What did he breed for, what use do they see around the Estate?”

He chuckles, a bit bemused, but not apparently unhappy.

“I didn’t take you for a cavalier, your grace.”

“My mother was something of a collector,” you explain. “Jane is a notably acclaimed horsewoman herself, tip of the top, and we share a stable back home. But I’ve always had a soft spot for the beasts. Not a scholar, by any means, she’s the one you’d want to talk to if you were looking for someone with opinions of their own, though I can keep up fairly well through a sort of knowledge-osmosis. I just think they’re neat.”

That is actually a pretty true way of putting it. When you were younger, the stables were a hiding place, a totally acceptable reason to avoid spending time around people. Horses are comparatively quite undemanding and pleasant companionship. They do not talk at all and they are soft. Even softer when you brush them. You can just pretend they are saying whatever you want, and as long as you treat them well, act consistently and stay calm, they’re easy to get along with. They are imaginary friends you can actually cry on and hug and whatever when you are feeling bad and lonely. Pretty much ideal in your book!

The soldier-types peel away as Dualscar ushers you into the stables. Stables smell exactly the same everywhere, and you feel yourself smile without doing it on purpose.

“There’s a second stable for draft horses,” he explains, either not noticing or simply not commenting on your abrupt mood shift. “I prefer not to travel by sea. When my household managers are securing supplies and sundries and acting as messengers on my behalf, they make use of any of these. My father invested a great deal of his free time perfecting a distance-riding horse for the terrain in this part of Derse. Fearless, very easily trained, with heavy double-coats in winter that thin drastically and without much work in summer. Any could carry two riders such as yourself safely over a half-meter path on bare rock face.”

You hear maybe three words of that. The horses have made their way curiously to the stable doors, ears cocked with interest. Ten of them in varying shades of white and grey, some dappled all over, others near-uniform in color. You love them immediately and completely. Could you bring horses to the Court? More importantly, could anyone stop you if you got a mind to do it? In a big enough ship, maybe traveling part of the way by land, if they’re as sure-footed as he says…

Dirk, when you catch a glimpse of him, does not look quite as excited as you are, though you can see shades of it. He’s not just staring grimly at your back anymore, at least, but still every bit as tense. You think this should probably be the best day of his life, so what’s the matter, huh? There are so many horses! You promised him horses at one point, and fortune has delivered them!

“I’m tremendously impressed,” you announce, drawn magnetically to all of them simultaneously, though the closest wins out, the big white fellow you could see from outside. On closer inspection, she is a mare, though an enormous one, with a pinkish grey nose and big dark eyes. In all respects, a handsome lady. You flatten your hand so she can sniff and assess your moral character or whatever it is horses do when they run their velvety lips over your palm and _snrrrf_ for a few seconds.

She’s well cared for, at least. Her eyes are clear and bright, her coat glossy, recently brushed, her nostrils clean and dry. As she comes to her horse conclusion, whatever that may be, she shoves her muzzle up against your hand and doesn’t quit until you pet her.

Dualscar calls in a pair of sullen-looking stablehands, just as old as the rest of the staff, if not more so, and introduces them to Dirk. In doing so, he recalls on his own that he doesn’t have much Common, making the same pronouncements as he did with Roxy, that this is a fellow to be treated decently.

With some effort, you persuade yourself to stop stroking the nice horse and go over to give your boyfriend a kiss and see him off, and he is immediately spirited away to fetch some bags of feed, from what you gather. You hope they will let him meet the horses properly, as you intend to do yourself.

Your host claps his hands again and calls in yet another pair of attendants, who seem to summon up two sets of fine leather tack from thin air.

“Have you a preference?” he asks, and you grin as you indicate the horse you’ve already decided, almost completely by random, is your favorite.

“What’s her name?” you ask. None of the horses have placards over their stalls, the way yours do back at home, with their names and ages and lineages.

At his answer, you revise all of your earlier estimations of worst barbarism of Dersian culture. Apparently, horses _do not get names_ , because they are horses and not people. He says this matter-of-factly and not in so many words, but you get the picture. It’s frivolity. 

Preposterous. Naming things is the least frivolous and most important thing there is.

You decide to call her ‘Cava’, which means ‘horse’, so it is not really even like changing the name she already had. Cava does not care about this development, or anything but snorting at the fellow getting her all dressed up, which is the best thing about horses. You can just say any old thing to them, or nothing, and they are always one hundred percent chill about it. The only bargain with them is consistency and predictability, that you don’t punish them for their trust in you.

“Would you like to be outfitted with a rifle, as well?” Dualscar asks, interrupting your horse meditation.

“To what end?” you ask, a touch caught off guard. Realizing, with some annoyance, that all this riding business is just about the most effective distraction someone could have offered you. You need to be more careful. You are not at home in the stables. You are dancing on the rim of a wine glass and you must not lose sight of your objective, no matter how comparatively boring Dualscar is when juxtaposed with the first horses you have seen in months, the most _normal_ you have felt in a very long time, all dressed up and preparing for a ride as you are.

This is no time to start fucking up.

“There are a number of favorable locations for ptarmigan hunting on our route,” he says, and to your credit, you let your face split open in a smile as though that is the best news you have ever heard despite loathing all such activities. “Should we spot one, a bit of sport might be welcome.”

“Splendid!” you declare. “By all means, if you would be so kind!”

It’s a bad idea to say ‘no’ to someone making a polite offer. Plain foolish, even if it wasn’t dangerous. People like you more when you accept the things they offer you, and double-so when you thank them enthusiastically and make them feel generous for having done so. As you watch, he opens a fine cabinet loaded with ornate longarms.

You aren’t much of a rifle-user. They’re far more unwieldy than a good handgun, or they always _were_ , when you had cause to use either. You were smaller back then, to be fair, and this may well be an interesting exercise of your capabilities. Also, being out of your element with a weapon is a good bit of a handicap to keep you from looking too skilled at shooting stuff.

The danger of sticking out, seeming to think yourself _better_ than someone, is hardly unfamiliar. One might think that being publicly considered the _best_ of your cohort of litgamella would be an asset, but it isn’t always. When people get the sense that you’re especially talented at something, some, not all, but enough to make it dangerous, can get it into their heads to take you down a peg.

Back then, you had your ways of biting back, when bitten. Fraught as your relationship with Jane might have been, and might still be, a split lip and a teary eye were all you ever would have needed to convince her that someone who had treated you unpleasantly ought to be done away with at the next convenient moment. And she had her ways of convincing mother to make it happen without letting on that it was on your behalf, because you hadn’t adequately managed the patron on your own.

Jane did look after you. Really, it must have come off strange and incomprehensible from the outside, but you feel it strong as ever, here in the stables, remembering everything she was to you. You miss her, or you miss the version of her you imagined, at least. She was a child, once, and she had to sleep alone and cry over the one-less-layer-of-safety the night after you were taken to the temple just as sure as you did.

Sighing, you pat Cava’s fuzzy pink nose before taking a few steps away to allow her to be bridled.

“You’d be somewhere in the neighborhood of one hundred and ninety centimeters?” Dualscar suggests, offering you a long, dangerous-looking breech-loading shotgun, finely polished ebony and gold-washed steel. It’s an elegant weapon, no frills but still very much a show piece, and you take a moment to appreciate the fine craftsmanship that must have gone into it, running your fingertips over the barrel.

He’s watching you. Right. You drag it out a bit. Amp your level of regard for the weapon from ‘mild interest’ to ‘something short of reverence’, to give him an idea of what that would look like, the level of warm regard and utter veneration you are capable of. He seems the type to desire that sort of thing. As he watches you handle the gun, you give your wrist the slightest bit of a graceful arch.

“Certainly thereabouts,” you agree placidly, after a long moment’s inspection. “This feels excellent, Lord Ampora, perfectly proportioned. A beautiful gun in all respects.”

Locking the reinforced cupboard behind him, he slings an even larger rifle over his shoulder and paces off to retrieve his mount. You turn back to Cava, now fully dressed up, exhaling all at once. At least you have one trustworthy ally accompanying you on this ride.

She gnashes her teeth a bit, though not to bite you, and you frown at her flaring nostrils and flicked-back ears, which only seem to intensify at the weight of your hand on the nosepiece of her ornamental bridle. That’s odd. She didn’t seem finicky before.

You stroke her face, trying to calm her down a bit, and she does settle, but she doesn’t seem comfortable, a pronounced tension still in the set of her face.

Humming soothingly, you check the buckles of the bridle, how it lays over her nose, and then urge her mouth open to have a look, and there’s the problem, plain as day. The insides of her cheeks look like she’s been regularly chewing razorwire as an afternoon snack for the past few years, and the spade bit they’ve set her up with can’t be helping.

Jane uses spades for her competition horses, but those are fastidiously trained mounts in the hands of an equally fastidious and talented rider. Most people who ride casually pull much too hard on the reins, a problem even with a gentle bit, and that’s clearly what’s been going on here, the poor thing, it’s a wonder she hasn’t tried to snip your fingers off, the way this setup has already started irritating her old scars.

You don’t think you’d even want to ride her with a snaffle bit, hurting like this. The poor thing has probably never known anything but pain from a bridle, and she’s still blinking at you with those dark, trusting eyes, as you no doubt hurt her even more in the process of feeling the situation out, her ears perked rather than laid flat. Hopeful. She somehow still trusts that you will make this better for her.

So you go ahead, take a knife from your belt, and cut the bit right off the bridle. Don’t even think twice until it’s done and you have the saliva-slick thing in your hand. Cava nickers softly and nudges you for more pets, and you oblige absentmindedly, slipping the knife back in your belt.

You’re not sure why you did that. That might have been very stupid. Rude, certainly, by anyone’s standards, Aetrian or Dersian or anything else. One simply doesn’t cut up another person’s property. You would know; that’s a rule you’ve invoked to protect yourself before.

But it’s just not right, is all, doing all this to a horse, which can’t invoke any rules at all, or talk, or do anything but be a horse. Those are old scars, layers on layers, red on pink on white. It’s just - it’s just _not right_ , in a way that stings and itches in a way little of the other Dersian not-rightness does. You don’t know what else to say. Can you say that to him? It’s not like you can somehow latch it back on and make her retake the thing, not now that she’s stopped fussing, her whole face relaxed, nostrils round, ears canted forward with interest as she curiously tries to eat one of the buttons on your coat.

Maybe you’ve never learned anything, really. You have such consistent ways of screwing yourself over.

You lead Cava out of the stall, get your boot into her fine gold-washed stirrup, and swing easily into the saddle. The ability to ride never really leaves you, and she doesn’t budge an inch, stays very still as you do so. She’s incredibly well-trained, though having seen the damage to her cheeks, you don’t much want to think about how that was accomplished.

Fuck it. You have a suspicion that you’ll lose less face for this by being confrontational than by looking soft-hearted. And you know exactly how to do it. Something inside you may still be the same kind of weak and pathetic it’s always been, but you’ve had decades to work around it. Ha, you can almost imagine Janey advising you, here. _Go for the throat_ , she’d say. He mentioned that he respected her. The choice is practically made for you, but the words you choose to slide the knife in are all your own.

“Did your father train his horses on spade bits?” you call, testing your ability to guide Cava with your knees. She seems quite responsive as a starting point, taking a few paces in either direction as you lean your weight against her.

“I beg your pardon?”

Dualscar leads a remarkably tall grey-white stallion out of a stall, mounting it with the ease of an experienced horseman of many fewer years of age. Hm.

“Spade bits, my lord,” you say, delicately holding out the rather gross one you’ve liberated from between Cava’s teeth between two fingers, like a snake that might bite you. “I’m sure there must be some mistake. This isn’t casual tack. I don’t suppose you plan on engaging in any kind of fancy competition-riding in the process of showing your grounds, do you? I mean, I should hope not, as I emphatically lack the skill and familiarity with your horses to join in.”

You toss the sticky bit off carelessly into the trodden-down straw in Cava’s stall with a wet clink. Dualscar is doing the full eyebrow-raise thing, which, well, fine. So you have to take it further. You smile as charmingly as you can manage.

“If you let your stablefellows run roughshod over your horses with such mismatched implements merely to keep them in line, you won’t get nearly as much use out of the creatures,” you note, giving Cava’s withers a pat. “You mentioned that you weren’t a particularly avid horseman, of course, so you could hardly be expected to understand their mistake. Better to correct it now than never.”

“You’re an uncommon man, Prince English.”

You ignore the slight edge of rigidly polite almost-insult to his tone, his probing at your resolve, and make your eyes very warm behind your glasses to compensate for the cold steel of your words. This should make then sting just that extra bit more. “I should hope so. I’m a prince. Hardly anything less common than that. Save of course for an Empress, and we haven’t got one of those in here to pull rank on me unless you’re keeping my beloved sister in one of these stalls. Now weren’t you going to show me the grounds? I tragically lack Jane’s aptitude for strategy, but I would relish the chance to regale her with stories of your fortifications and resources as might befit a full-scale military occupation once I am delivered back to Aetria. My lord.”

This is no longer a boring situation at all. He doesn’t exactly stare you down, but the set of his one jewellike purple eye hardens for a moment before the tension abruptly smooths from his face.

You click your tongue, not waiting for a verbal reply, and Cava trots willingly off towards the opposite end of the hall of stables, where they open out onto the moors, pausing only to give a curious whuffle in the direction of Dualscar’s horse. Still bitted and bridled, the stallion does not react, but you can hear it begin to clip-clop after you on the stone stable floor after you pass.

The structure opens up outside of the wall, and even in the wan winter light, it is undeniably a grand vista. No vegetation past knee height, low grasses and a few hardy-looking shrubs, their leaves already browned and thinned by the winter. Wind sweeps your hair up and briefly threatens your glasses before you figure how to face into it, giving Cava a knee-squeeze to direct her to halt in place.

“So, where to?” you ask pleasantly, as the hulking grey stallion trots up ahead and comes to a stop before you on what could be loosely considered a path through the moors.

Dualscar turns on his horse, and it’s funny how normal he looks, peculiarly young-old, yes, but _normal_ , when you can only see the undamaged part of his face.

“We’ll ride for the wall. It spans twenty kilometers along the fringes of the Estate.”

“Another wall?” you ask, impressed; the last couple you’ve encountered still loom behind you, after all. “I don’t suppose there’s anyone you’re interested in keeping out? The Dersian navy seemed to harbor no ill will towards your presence, here. Though if they believe you dead, as many I met in the Court seemed to...”

“It’s an old wall,” he says, turning back and ushering his horse to a walking pace, to which Cava easily catches up with a tongue click and a pat. “While I am very much alive, all rumors to the contrary aside, my enemies are dead, now. It was built when they still lived.”

“Ah,” you say, immediately interested in that. “I don’t know a lot about Dersian dynasties, but I suppose there must have been some trouble there, to make this place so worth the rather intense level of protection it seems you’ve got going on. Mad king type situation?”

You’ve read a lot of books that have mad kings in them, and you’ve always thought the threat they pose was probably overstated. One shitty man is pretty easy to poison or depose, in your experience. Well, Jane’s experience more than yours, but you claim it vicariously. If you are Jane, or close to Jane, anything can be done.

At the same time, you’re certain that’s not what he’s talking about at all. _Go on, then_ , you think, _correct me_.

“It might surprise you to know that the truly existential threat once came by sea,” he notes. “Pirates passing through, retreating for more southern climes. One’s vulnerability is proportionate to one’s accessibility by maritime travel.”

Closer to what you want to talk about.

“I don’t know, it sounds rather exciting!” you laugh. “I can’t say I’m in any danger of falling in love with the whole sea rat nonsense myself, and I’ll be relieved to scrub these unbecoming calluses from my hands at the first opportunity, but… well, there is something just dreadfully romantic about the whole pirate business. If you can set aside the murdering and the treachery and whatever the hell else they get up to, such as philandering I suppose.”

Surprisingly, he reciprocates the laugh. Huh. Perhaps you really have managed to barrel through the potential hazard of his offense at your criticism of his stable practices.

“You’re very young, Prince English. Difficult though it may be to believe, I was young once myself.”

“I’m actually pretty good at believing in things,” you suggest, nudging Cava ahead so you can smile winningly over your shoulder at him, your horses walking side-by-side. “Don’t tell me you have a daring, swashbuckling past of your own.”

 _Or rather_ , you think to yourself, _do, please, as soon as possible_.

“Perhaps not in so many words. It was many more decades ago than you’ve likely been alive, your grace.”

“Ha, so you’re a man of the seas! Or you were,” you prompt. “That’s hardly something of which to be ashamed, you’ll get no judgement from me, not fresh off the literal pirate ship I’ve been commissioning.”

“Not precisely for matters of piracy, either. Trade. The Ampora family’s name and business has flagged in decades past, and my preparedness for a long siege has no small amount of justification in the very factors responsible for our decline. Risks long passed, of course, but risks that left me orphaned at a young age, the master of the Estate before I’d prepared myself to consider what that might be like.”

You make what you think is a very sympathetic noise, here, when he pauses contemplatively.

“I’m an orphan as well,” you note. “Recently. Somewhat self-made, but…”

First time using the o-word. You’ve always figured that your father was among the litgamella, somewhere, as is tradition. A cohort of convenient consorts for an Empress who, by nature of her position, must foreswear a full-time partner. She must be wedded to Aetria, and Aetria must be her first child. Historically, the litgamella make an easy, stringlessly-unattached stable full of sires for potential future heirs and heiresses and whatever, which presumably eases the burden of loneliness.

Probably less so for Janey. You mucked that up for her, the best of the best being her own brother, very much off-limits. Mother, when you think about it, probably gave her some kind of hard time over that. She did like to foster healthy competition between the two of you, as much as she could.

As two siblings actually willing to work together towards a common goal, you and Jane did immediately orchestrate a violent coup, so mother was completely right to act on her compunctions. She knew the danger you and Jane could have posed to her if you were allowed to get along and not resent each other constantly for every slight. Easier to keep things running smoothly in the household without you two finding familial solace in each other, with her as the exclusive font for that sort of comfort.

Yes, that was smart of her.

If Dualscar notices your lapse into contemplation, he doesn’t mention it.

“I understand,” you say, after a while. “The complexities of family and nobility and succession and legacy are not so different in Aetria.”

“If I had lost the Estate, there would have been nothing left to us. So I devised means to keep it, regardless of the threat. The wall, a system of levies that can be quickly erected to cordon off the river, the means to prevent entry by sea, though the cliffs do much of the heavy lifting in that regard. My youthful enthusiasm for self-preservation, I hope, will serve Aetrian interests as well as it did mine.”

“So it worked, then? Whatever the threat that had you building walls… snuffed right out?”

“Bled out in my arms.”

“Oh,” you say. “By the time I got to my mother, she was already dead, but the bleeding, I mean, that takes a while to - the bleeding is kind of a universal thing, isn’t it?”

You’re responding more on autopilot than anything, crunching away at the implications. Kanaya, obviously, that must be who he’s talking about. That doesn’t seem like the way she told the story at all, though. To be fair, her story ends with him dead, and here he is, alive. And here he also is, thinking her as dead as she recently thought him. It’s just another layer of inconsistency that digs into the meat of your heel like a pebble in your stocking.

And you don’t like thinking about people being all bloody in arms, anyway, which you think is perfectly fair of you.

“Yes,” he agrees. “Let’s pick up our pace. I would prefer to be back within the main walls by sundown.”

It’s difficult to hold a conversation at the quick trotting pace he sets, so you don’t even try. Just sort of think, and stare at the horizon until you can make out the distant wall, the mountains peaking over it, the blue-grey haze that obfuscates them. In the direction you’re travelling, unfortunately, there’s no easy way to bring up any of the architecture disappearing into the background, including the church, drat.

You pass what look like fields, barren in the wintertime. A stable for draft horses, which he points out, and bunkhouses for the laborers who care for them and tend to the agricultural needs of the Estate. Entirely self-sustaining, capable of resourcing a much larger population than the one currently residing within the walls. Guard towers, guard barracks, this and that and the other, mills and silos and practically a small town, though you don’t see another living soul out of doors.

There’s no obvious way to ask questions as he points things out, between the wind and the gait of Cava and his horse. You smile and try to judge what he’s thinking, and what you think of him. What you trust about what he’s said so far.

When you’re close enough to really see it, the wall is massive. No fancy lilac granite here; the stone isn’t pretty, likely hewn from some local mountain or another. Skillfully put together, though. It would take an awful lot of black powder to even think about making a dent in it.

“Shall we ride along the span?” he offers, as you take a moment to marvel conspicuously at the sight. “A kilometer west, a portcullis leads through, though it would be nigh impenetrable without skilled operation by my staff.”

“No need. The structure looks as well-repaired as though it were erected yesterday. How long ago did you say you had the thing built?”

“It would be about fifty years, now.”

“Gracious, if this is Dersian craftsmanship at work, you lot have really been holding out on the rest of us! Not to mention… fifty years? My lord, I can’t lie to you, I’ve heard intimations of your age, but I find it all terribly difficult to wrap my brain around. You have the vitality of a much younger man, if I’m not too bold to say so.”

“Not bold, but perhaps excessively benignant with your praise.”

“Hardly,” you say, smiling. “This is a thing of beauty. I must admit, I’ve been impressed by most everything about the operation you’re running, here. Do you truly need my affidavit or my goods for barter in order to convince my sister to give you anything you desire and more for the strategic location that will most certainly win her the war?”

That, at the moment, is the most pressing question on your mind. Fields, barracks, a wall that must have taken thousands of builders a terrifically long time to put together, a port, a lovely castle, and this fellow all too willing to share it, apparently.

There are plenty of reasons to back the new power player in town, and just as many to ingratiate himself to them. Especially if Jane has caught wind of his whole nonconsensual enslavement deal. Surely she would find that repellant, and if even modestly aware of that situational factor, would never work with him if she didn’t have a plan to put a stop to it. She’s savvy enough to sweep in, thank him for his hospitality, and have him executed once the whole song and dance is over with for his long list of crimes against humanity. Once he gets so much of a whiff of her ironclad principles and sound moral character, he’ll know - if he doesn’t already - that he’s on borrowed time, unless he can really upsell himself as an ally.

You want to know what perspective he’s approaching this from. More about his interactions with Jane, if you can swing it.

“I’m relieved by your confidence,” he notes, after a moment’s thought. “But I hope that you understand, Prince English, while appearances may paint a conflicting picture, I’m an old man. I dreamed of a far more meaningful life, and just as much, a death that might not find me alone, cloistered behind three high walls. If I’m to make a final foray at political significance, I will do so thoroughly, correctly, and without compromise.”

That tells you almost nothing, like, it feels like an _on purpose_ telling-you-nothing, but it’s also the sort of way you would likely answer that question, so you can’t fault him for it. And it itches at you, for a moment - where have you heard this sort of thing before? His language use, the staid but unmistakable conviction of his tone, all of it continues to conjure up a ghostly but ever more concrete image of Kanaya that you quickly blink away.

You suppose the common element is the familiarity of their nobilesse, resonating at a frequency that penetrates straight to the marrow of your bones. After so many months without interacting with another person of your upbringing, both of them remind you, in one way or another, of home. Not only in the fake way, either, the way they would have if you were _actually_ the pre-odyssey-of-personal-growth self you’ve been carting around like a marionette of meat through which to speak to Dualscar. ‘Oh, thank fuck, someone who’s decent and not a scary outside-person, such as a pirate’. Really, truly, on a subcellular level, you feel among your people with them. People you’ve grown up with, whose perspectives you understand, and who are more likely than most to indulge your perspective, even if it deviates slightly from theirs. Like you know their rules already, or they’ll assume that you do.

It had seemed an incidental sense in your interactions with Kanaya, that she had just spun an incredibly regal and oddly comforting bearing out of thin air, but… you don’t really understand, now, if you ever did. Her familiarity is precisely why it makes you so very uncomfortable when she does something _wrong_ , like not hitting you when you disappoint her or talk back too impudently.

Dualscar is easier to just be _that_ unexamined Jakeself around. Because he probably would act a lot more like mother or one of the head priests than Kanaya would, if you pushed him far enough. There’s a comfort to what is already known, what you’ve spent decades getting used to _knowing_.

“So, what lays beyond the wall, if I were to pass through the portcullis you mentioned and ride until I found a settlement?” you ask. “I’d imagine that’s the sort of question Janey would ask, here.”

As you begin the slow trek towards the cliffs, he launches into an explanation of Dersian geopolitics that instantly exhausts you. Roads, which of these roads are well or ill maintained, other ports that could be taken, settlements that might be sympathetic, settlements that would surely need violent _convincing_ to accept a change in governance. He knows the area well, you suppose, though you don’t have the context to determine if he’s full of it.

While you clearly have to sit through this to establish your credibility, you rather wish you didn’t. It seems like you’ve been getting closer to something sincerely revelatory, or at least more interesting than the approximate geospatial location of the nearest ore-extraction operation.

“I apologize for my long-windedness,” he notes, perhaps realizing that your gaze has gone a bit glassy behind your spectacles.

“Oh, not at all,” you say, picking up your expression back up to an acceptable one quickly. “I’m an irredeemable dunce on this and most such subjects. That’s hardly your fault.”

“You ask effective questions for an irredeemable dunce,” he observes. “I will admit, I’m not yet sure exactly what to make of you.”

“I learned from Jane’s example,” you say, shrugging. Which is true, you’re channeling her as best you can to make this work. Pretending to be Jane, in your head, has always been a good bet when someone wants you to act smart and competent. “I _do_ pay attention, even if I often fail to understand. What you see in me is a shadow of my sister.”

“Your devotion to her is admirable.”

“Please do tell her you think so, should the opportunity arise,” you laugh. “With family, of course, such things can seem more complicated than they really are. I would imagine you have a far clearer sense of my esteem for her than she does, at this point.”

Sad, but probably true. It’s been a long time since you could talk about Jane without Dirk looking at you all weird over it, like you were some kind of unrepentant recovering addict waxing poetic about his last bottle of grain whiskey. It’s quite nice to shed that layer of conversational reservation.

“Indeed.”

“Were your parents your only family, Lord Ampora?”

“My father, specifically, though his business required him to spend long stretches of time at sea. My mother expired in the birthing bed. It was my fortune to be born an only child and hers to die.”

“Ah, I’m sorry to hear that,” you say politely, grateful to be on a subject you’ve already thought over, and some common ground, besides. “I can relate, however. Aetrian imperial convention doesn’t recognize an heir or heiress as having more than one parent, and then, only the one who carries them, not the other contributor. I never gave a thought to the fact that I might have a father until I learned that he would likely be a litgamella himself. And mother, of course, was perennially occupied with matters of state.”

“Litgamella? I’ve read the term, but it’s one that has eluded my understanding thus far.”

“Allow me to explain, then, by all means!” you say, forcing yourself not to smile too obviously. Took him long e-friggin’-nough to ask. “You did ask the right person, I might add. Given that I am one.”

Fortunately, you are watching him as you say this, and you catch a flicker of - surprise? Maybe. He didn’t know. Or he didn’t expect you to tell him. Hmmmm.

“It’s a fairly revered position in Aetrian society,” you explain, when he makes no gesture to stop you. “Before the reign of the First Empress, a youth from every noble house was submitted as a sort of tithe to the nameless god, to be raised in the temple and named in his service when he came of age. It’s still considered a devotional service, but more practical for civil purposes as opposed to celestial ones, less weirdly gendered, and instrumental to the imperial family and imperial dictates, these days. We are trained practitioners in the art of… accommodation. The word literally means ‘host’, indicates a host-role, though its etymological origin has more to do with… connection, connecting, joining. My mother, before she took the throne, trained as a litgamella, and she wore her immulatio along with her crown to demonstrate her twofold service of Aetrian interest. Frequently, though, heirs, both imperial or in other noble houses, are produced through… _association_ with litgamella. Such couplings are easy and broadly accepted ways to produce a child without messy political marriage and entanglement and somesuch, as litgamella have no right to their offspring and technically hold no title, save for certain exceptions, including yours truly.”

Normally, you would be less cagey about the whole thing, but you imagine he’s clever enough to piece it all together, especially with your hand back at your immulatio and your lashes low, smile disarming and lips set in an appealing pout.

Some meanings are easier to convey without words.

“Ah,” he says, after a second’s pause, holding your gaze curiously all the while. “I see.”

“What I lack in terms of my sister’s touch for policymaking and governance, I do like to think that I make up for in other areas,” you add, with the most subtle and tasteful flutter of lashes that you can muster up.

Oh, it is pleasant to be back to doing something you know you’re good at, even moreso to feel it working. He isn’t leering, too polite for that, you suppose, but he is definitely _looking_.

“Together, we manage quite well in terms of keeping things under control in the upper echelons. Or we did, until I got myself kidnapped, but that’s sort of an occupational hazard to being an over-romantic idiot.”

More of a stretch than anything you’ve said thus far, though not completely a lie. Jane had plans, and good ones, too. You would have helped her an awful lot, in whatever way she wanted you to. You’re still put out, when you dig for the emotion, by how easily she gave you up, in the end.

“Then I suppose it’s for the best that we execute our business partnership without unnecessary delay,” he notes. “I’m very much in favor of any effort to maintain stability in Aetria’s governing system.”

You let your shoulders droop incrementally, though you can feel him nibbling at the hook. He’s not quite where you want him just yet.

“I…” you say hesitantly, looking up, then down at your free hand wrapped around Cava’s reins, the other still worrying at the circlet of velvet around your neck. “Of course. I have to go back. It’s a waste, waffling around when I could be doing so much to help her out. But…”

You trail off. Make your eyes very big, and a little lost-helpless-pathetic, that sort of range, as you look back up at him for real.

“I don’t know. I’m not… in any rush.”

 _Rescue me_ , you say with every shred of your body language. _You caught me in my bluff, I am a poor foolish callow young thing who needs to be taught the true ways of the world, all misguided confidence and raw talent with no will to use it. So much potential. You could teach me. You could mold me into anything. I am at a crossroads, ripe on the vine for picking. Pick me and sink your teeth in and I will be yours._

It’s a lie, this part is almost totally a lie, you are still going to kill him and steal all of his beautiful treasures and books and especially horses.

But this is the moment you’ve been building up to, so far as establishing your character, and you can almost hear it as the puzzle-pieces click into place. Just as you explained to Kanaya, he sees you, now, the way you want him to see you. A young man who is in over his head, who wants to go home and fears what he will find there all at once. Who may lash out a bit, may be rash and inexperienced and a bit of a fool, but is really just a scared, cold, forsaken creature wandering about in the rain, looking for a set of arms to crawl into.

And maybe that was true of you once, but it isn’t, now, you _have_ arms already, and they belong to Dirk, and you also belong to Dirk, but he doesn’t have to see that. All you have to do is tell this tiny sliver of truth, and he will tell himself the rest of the story. The reason for your silly attachment to your servingpeople, your presumption about the horses, your intermittent boredom and excitement, all of it. It’s all part of a consistent narrative, and the pieces are slotting together behind his single sighted eye as you glance up at him hesitantly, then away, as though you’ve said too much.

You’ve got him, now.

“I see,” he says again. He sees exactly what you want him to see.

“It’s not…” you say, like you’re trying to set the record straight. “Nothing - I want to go home, posthaste, I’d do anything to be of aid to Jane, I do so dearly love my country, Lord Ampora, please don’t think for a second that I have any hesitations. I just. Oh, I don’t know how to explain it. I… I’ve so greatly appreciated your hospitality already, and if I could stay a while, just get to know a tad bit more of life outside of Aetria, I’ve already seen wonders the likes of which I never could’ve envisioned, I...”

He nods, putting up a hand as though to physically arrest your momentum, and you take a great, heaving breath, stop and spend a moment calming yourself down.

See, you really couldn’t have said that in front of Dirk. It’s very hard to get into character in his company when you’re so accustomed to being in a different one around him. But it all works out in the end. You give a delicate, tragic-hero sort of sniff, then continue on your way to the cliffs that overlook the sea, another twenty-minute trot over the path tread into the bluffs.

It’s nearing sunset already. Short days. The sky is fading from grey to blue as you approach the scarp down to the ocean, though it should be at least another hour before the sun really starts vanishing in earnest. Not that you could tell, behind the omnipresent layer of downy cloud cover.

The sea looks different here than it does in La Ansephemine, and different twice over from the ship harbor in the Court, the roiling waves beneath the Queen’s lighthouse.

Cava pauses near the ledge, sidling up next to Dualscar’s big stallion, huffing a cloud of moisture out into the cool evening air.

“You’re a welcome guest in my home,” Dualscar affirms, not looking at you, speaking as he looks out over the fairly calm grey surface of the ocean. “For as long as you mean to stay, I will gladly continue to lodge you and your coterie.”

“Thank you,” you say, just loud enough that it isn’t lost on the wind.

“I had a brother, once. Of a sort. My father never took another wife, but the wet nurse he secured for me had a child. As good as family, raised as a second son to him, every bit my equal. I recognize the complexity of such relations.”

“Did something happen to him?” you ask.

“I lost him in the same uprising that killed my father.”

“Ah,” you say, wincing sympathetically. That explains the horrific violence, then, the murder of Kanaya’s mother and all the others along with the would-be murder of Kanaya herself. Explains, but doesn’t excuse it, since - well, such problems as slave uprisings can be easily circumvented by not enslaving people in the first place.

Either way, a lot of violence for no especially good reason, a lot of suffering out of nothing. Sad.

“Don’t be sorry on their account,” he says. “The living suffer. The dead rest.”

He’s still looking at the sea, brow furrowed. You gaze out in the direction he seems to be looking. Nothing on the horizon, just low waves disappearing into the grey-blue sky, the line between them blurred beyond easy extrication.

“What do you believe happens afterwards, Lord Ampora?” you ask.

“Nothing,” he says simply. “Do Aetrians believe in life after death?”

“Some do. The spirit lingers in the skull, watching over its descendants, that’s the prevailing opinion, though mother didn’t hold with that sort of faith. And if you don’t believe, I don’t suppose it counts.”

You can’t actually imagine her watching over you or Jane, really, either.

“Do _you_ believe, Prince English?”

When you died, before, believing in nothing, drowned in the cold sea, there was no light waiting for you, no skull-based transubstantiation, no island like the one to which Dirk’s soul travelled. Just darkness and weight and water.

“I believe we only get one life,” you say. “And it is often a good bit shorter than one might hope.”

He nods slowly, shifts to appraise your expression, and returns his focus to the sea.

“You mentioned your experiences with pirates, and with the Velvet Court, your grace.”

“Yes, I most certainly did! Quite mentionable, all that hubbub and hullabaloo and, well, murdery stuff.”

“You may as well know, I’ve hidden from them for too long. Vermin of the ocean. No better than scum. You asked what I want from your sister, what I hope to negotiate for. Why I need what you have to offer.”

He abruptly urges his stallion to a walk, and you follow in silence along the cliff’s edge. As you move closer to the castle, the docks come into view, where the _Ascension_ is moored. You can’t quite make out the deck, so far down, in the already waning light, but if you concentrate, you think you can hear the strains of guitar and song. Perhaps you’re just imagining it. Aradia singing her ‘Not Today!’ song, gleefully jamming out.

You look up at him questioningly as his horse comes to a stop.

“It was them who robbed me of my wealth, my family, my legacy,” he says. “My face. Your sister means to wage war with Derse. I mean to facilitate this, on the condition that she flush the scourge of piracy from our waters in the process. That the Velvet Court burn, and that the filth that inhabit it burn too, their ships, their spoils, their Gods. I would see it all destroyed, before I die, see justice done. I _will_ see them die. All of them.”

Your mouth feels rather dry, your chest abruptly rather tight. Uncomfortably so.

“Of course,” you say. “Really, just utter - you’re right, of course, they all ought to be killed, and very violently, too. I, ah, I certainly have more reason to agree with you on this count than most people.”

He nods, laughing harshly as he does so.

“It was fate that brought you to me,” he says, more to the _Ascension_ than to you, though his hand is up to his ruined cheek, like he’s indicating it on purpose. “The doctor who saved my life told me that my story was not yet over.”

“Well, I’m sure he was right!” you say. “Where there’s life, there’s more story.”

“Not always.”

“Of course, alright,” you agree. “I can’t claim to be an expert or anything. If you don’t mind, though, d’you think you could show me around the rest of the grounds a bit before we lose the light?”

Honestly, you’d really rather not talk about this anymore. If he means to make you uncomfortable enough to avoid further questions, he’s succeeded abundantly. You have brainspace for exactly one set of ethical contradictions, and it is already thoroughly _ocupado_ with Kanaya’s child-murder thing, which you haven’t _forgotten_ , just decided it’s acceptable in light of other stuff you believe, and… and, well, if he wanted your sympathy, he should have done this monologue before you saw Cava’s mouth, and before Dirk told you the stories from Kanaya’s book of accounts, and he should have made sure you weren’t a pirate, first, too.

Despite all this, you have a real impulse to nod along, and you don’t like that one bit. You don’t like how your thoughts turn almost immediately to how _you_ could survive this imaginary Court-burning scenario rather than ways to stop him. You’re glad you didn’t have Dirk along to probably lose his grip at that _threat_ , the man does not like threats at all, but you miss him all the same, because at least he would tell you what to do and how to feel, and that would give you something else to fixate on beyond what the Lord Ampora is clearly willing to ask of you.

What can you do, really? There’s no un-suspicious way to press about that… doctor, is there? He mentioned Gods on his own, without being prompted. So you definitely can’t rule out something supernatural and fishy in equal measure. You had hoped for answers, but you have so many more questions, and so much uncertainty, and you just… you don’t want to have to go back to the castle and be in charge of Dirk and Roxy. You genuinely have no right to be in charge of anyone or anything. Maybe not even a horse. Cava doesn’t know you well enough to distrust you yet, but maybe she should.

It’s so dumb, how everything you pretend too well starts to feel real. At least when you were pretending to be a good pirate boyfriend, that was actually something someone you give a shit about wanted you to be. It was actually something worth being.

Ugh. You feel miserable, and on-edge, and being shown rows and rows of barracks - slave quarters, Dirk would say, and he would be right, you can’t let yourself start forgetting how evil this man is - does not do a thing for it. He mentions the church, as you pass, but only perfunctorily, not giving you a chance to enquire further. Just confirming your suspicion that it was built after the wall was erected, that it is more recent than the rest.

At least you didn’t have to shoot any ptarmigans, whatever the shit those are. Despite your fine, well-made coat, the strap of the rifle has started to chafe your shoulder a bit. And besides that, you’re tired, and you’re cold, and you’re as miserable as anyone who has ever walked the earth. And you don’t even completely know why.

Sometimes these things just hit you hard for no reason. You’d thought you were doing so well, that maybe you could get through to him, but then… is there really any winning with this sort of thing? You just need someone to talk to, to help you make sense of all this new and old information, but it’s so far outside of Dirk’s realm of expertise, and even Roxy, who is at least good at faking things, how would she understand at all?

You wish you could talk to Jane, just let her handle everything like she used to. You wish you didn’t have to do this on your own, even after all the help you already got, which feels like a pittance, a pile of matchsticks to dam a river of incompetence.

“A meal should be waiting for us,” Dualscar notes, as you near the fortified stable entrance by which you exited the walled portion of the grounds in the first place.

“Posilutely spiffing!” you reply, with great superficial conviction and none at all in your heart. Though maybe you’re just hungry, that sometimes happens.

You don’t want to hand Cava off to the stablehands or to surrender your loaner rifle to Dualscar, but you do. The redeeming aspect about re-finding your footing on the stone floor of the stable is that, like the angel he is, Dirk appears to join you. There is a bit of straw in his hair, but he seems in good spirits, by the way he’s carrying himself, at least, so perhaps you won’t have to lie to keep him in a decent mood.

“Dea brava?” you ask, feeling like you might burst into tears if the answer is ‘no’. It doesn’t make any sense! Everything is fine, he is just a bit more pirate-specific vengeful than you expected, that’s all, but at the same time… at the same time…

“ _Horses_ ,” Dirk says reverently, and you throw your arms around his shoulders and kiss him before he can say anything else. Above all else, he is a comfort. “But yeah. Deavi brava. Wait till I tell you about this fuckin’ baby horse, dude, I didn’t know what baby horses _looked like_...”

You bury your face in his shoulder and take a breath, which distracts him. He smells homey and stable-y all at once. You wonder if you could forgo dinner and drag him upstairs and fuck him in the bathtub or something, you must be awfully gross after a full day trotting around, but you’re desperate to be comforted in earnest.

“You okay?” he murmurs, then stiffens with alarm. “If something happened…”

“Nothing happened,” you mumble into the side of his neck. The bruised side. “I’m just tired. Did you make friends?”

“I’m pathetically inept at socializing. And none of them think I can speak Common. So no. Kept track of what I overheard, though.”

Good. Something to talk about more thoroughly with the water running. You haul him into another deep kiss to remind yourself that you’re a real person, in real love, with a real future outside of the venom in Dualscar’s words and the sincerity with which he said them, he _believed_ all that stuff about killing all of your friends, seemed to think Jane might as well, that you might help him convince her, and didn’t you used to more or less think the same thing about pirates? Didn’t you try to kill Dirk, wouldn’t you have done that?

His body is warm and steady in a way that bad thoughts and memories aren’t. You suck at his lower lip, your body smooshed as close to his as you can get, though you release him from the somewhat awkward pressed-up-against-the-stable-wall type position when Dualscar reappears.

He politely doesn’t comment, not on the compromising situation and not on the spring returned to your step as Dirk walks beside you on the way back into the great hall, where, as promised, a handsome feast awaits. Roxy is among the maidy types bringing out steaming pots and trays and serving implements, though she peels off with a quick ‘goodbye’ to join you when she sees you.

She seems in good spirits, and as much as you can tell, the staff seem comfortable with her. So you don’t just have the minimal and rather dire information you managed to extract from Dualscar to work with, likely. Dirk overheard things. Roxy must have made friends, will have ideas and insights of her own.

It’s not airtight, it’s not Jane holding your hand through it, but it’s a real set of failsafes. And you didn’t fail.

Really, you didn’t fail at all. You learned a lot of things, put yourself in an ideal position to learn more. You’re just a bit muddled, that’s all. Sometimes you second-guess things, especially yourself. Usually that’s a good strategy, because you are pretty useless in a lot of ways and have a habit of getting stuff wrong, but in this sort of situation… you’re good at this.

You did good. You’d like someone to _tell you_ so, but in the mean time, you make do with sitting down between Dirk and Roxy, sandwiched between people who care about at least one version of you.

The food is just as glorious as the previous night’s late repast. Little roasted game-birds that Dualscar points out to be ptarmigan from a hunt earlier in the week, expressing disappointment that you didn’t chance upon any on your tour of the grounds. They’re doused in a maple-sweet and savory brown gravy, the skin crisped beneath the rich sauce. Heaps of roasted vegetables decorate a long tray, seasoned with garlic and lemon. A cold salad of fruits from the morning’s breakfast, tender leaves of some kind of green, fleshy lettuce, and candied chestnuts scattered overtop joins a rich stew of mushrooms, potatoes, and kale in rounding out the meal.

Less than the feast that greeted you on arrival, but not _much_ less. Dirk, to your relief, finally seems to have re-found his appetite and polishes off three whole roast ptarmigan. You help yourself just as generously. It’s all exactly as delicious as it looks.

Okay. Maybe you were hungry.

The conversation that accompanies the meal is hardly worth mentioning. This is a bit deliberate on your part; now that you’re back to being sensible about things, you recognize that, yes, sure, that got a bit emotionally intense, there, and the only way to ensure he dips back in and tells you more is to make it clear that you aren’t _fixated_ on any of the revelations, that you don’t care _too much_ , that you were interested, but not overly so, not to excess. He will have to tell you more to keep you involved and on the same page.

You discuss the weather, a classic. Horses, with liberal side-conversation with Dirk in Aetrian, which you use to try to ascertain how much, if any, Dualscar understands. He seems to know the word for ‘horse’, at very least, but the more complex ideas you convey, ‘not’ this or ‘this, but only if that’ don’t seem to translate until you explain what you’re talking about in Common.

The conversation turns to linguistics, in the most perfunctory and least interesting of ways. You can feel Dirk wanting to weigh in, but he behaves himself and pretends to be trying his best to follow, but mostly bored. Easy enough to do, you suppose, when he has a heap of fresh protein on his plate. You learn that Dualscar has a longstanding interest in Aetrian, that he had a book in the language long before he knew what it was, that it was anything but gibberish.

Perhaps the most interesting thing you discuss is the boundary. You neglect to mention that it has thoroughly fallen, perhaps sort of suggest with your word use that the pirate attack may have weakened it, but do bring up Aetria’s Gods, the First Empress and the nameless one, and the role of widespread belief in Aetrian deific lore in the boundary’s protections.

He asks a few questions about that, and you answer them frankly - there’s a lot you don’t know, but you’re willing to speculate, and you do - before you turn the subject to Derse’s belief systems, which are looser and more all-over-the-place than Aetria’s unified religious practice.

“You did mention the… church, I suppose that’s what you call that structure, right?” you note, still kicking yourself for not finding a way to nudge harder while you were actually riding by the thing.

“Yes, I suppose that is what it would be called,” he agrees, with a good-humored chuckle. “I do practice a faith. Quite devoutly, along with many members of my staff.”

This does make you wonder what sort of religion just totally dismisses the idea of anything coming after dying, but, well, you don’t know every religion. This would be a great moment to have Aradia around to bounce ideas. As-is, you let the revelation slide by conversationally, filing it away for later. He declines to offer you a text to study or any immediate participation in a service, and you are just the right amount of curious about what he means by that.

It’s a fairly long meal, and it leaves you sated, in better spirits, more certain that you know where you stand.

Roxy conveniently drapes herself against your shoulder, and even Dirk finds it in himself to pretend to be at ease, sort of, and this becomes your excuse to retreat back to your chambers. Perhaps the biggest relief of all is that the entire affair passes without him doing his funny interested-stare thingy at either of them.

He is doing that in your direction, now, quite thoroughly, and you are pleased as punch about it.

Safely returned to your quarters, you strip off your long coat immediately and toss yourself down in one of the plush chairs as Roxy draws bathwater and Dirk turns down the bed. What were you worried about, actually? What gave you the idea that everything might not be proceeding in the finest and dandiest of ways? You were never _supposed_ to figure everything out right away. This is a marathon, not a sprint.

The threats of pirate-genocide, you guess, those must have thrown you off. But Jane would never buy into that, she’s not the slash-and-burn type, not if there’s a diplomatic way to go about things. Especially not if the fellow who’s all for the mass murdering is _this_ fellow. And either way, you’ll kill him before he can carry out any such threat.

Past-you might have been enough of a sap to fall for the sob story justifying horrific crimes, but you are not. When Dirk is done tidying up, looking as out of place as he does so as if he were a soldier stumbling into a dessert parlor in full dress uniform, you usher him over onto your lap.

Just for kissing, Roxy will be done with the bath, soon. His weight on top of you is exactly what you need, no words, nothing complicated, just him with his body, and you with yours. Your hands pushing up the hem of his shirt to caress the fine, solid musculature of his back, your lips against his mouth, his face, his steeply angled jaw. Perfect, actually, that you have him, why would you want anything else, anything more or less from anyone?

You could play this role forever, could pull the few strands of straw from his hair and laugh and lean back in to intensify the kissing for the rest of your mortal life.

The water stops in the bathing-room, but you’re not doing anything that should bother Roxy, so you keep at it, your self-reassuring kissing-your-boyfriend, the most normal thing ever.

Until someone clears their throat from a few feet away, and it doesn’t sound like Roxy.

You look up in a flash, and actually shriek, nearly sending Dirk tumbling to the stone floor in your haste to stand and recollect yourself.

“I hope we’re not interrupting anything,” Kanaya says pleasantly.

For several reasons, this effectively short-circuits your brain, which becomes obvious as you try to stammer out several replies. Most obviously, the door to your room was barred, and now there is someone in your room who wasn’t, previously. She’s standing right beside your nice four-poster bed, Vriska there with her, both of them modestly scuffed up but no worse for whatever wear they’ve experienced since leaving the _Ascension_.

So you should be screaming for help, right? If he can see in, somehow, if someone is observing, that’s the worry guiding so much of your behavior behind closed doors, and you really ought to call for help!

“Who, ah, who are you?” you finally manage to say. “And how the devil did you enter my quarters, you… er, rapscallions?”

“Fucking can it, English,” Vriska sighs. “It’s cool, we scoped out the tunnels! There are totally ways someone _could_ be watching you mack on my first mate, but no one’s watching right now.”

“But… supernatural means?” you suggest weakly, still reeling.

“We’re protected,” Kanaya explains, reaching beneath the neckline of her full-coverage dark brown blouse to produce a… shark tooth on a string? “A tooth from my fiancee, imbued with a non-negligible portion of her power. His surveillance will not reach us. The only worry is that he may notice a blind spot in his awareness of the manor. To mitigate this, we don’t stay long in any one place.”

“Yeah, and for your information, the tunnels are crawling with servants!” Vriska adds. “It’s been a shitshow trying to keep from running into anyone. Like, no big deal, obviously, Kanaya’s records are pretty good for predicting who’ll be where, when, but still!!!!!!!! Whole fuck of a lot of people skittering around in the walls.”

“Thank you for that image,” you grumble, sitting back down in your chair. “A reassuring one, to be sure. Have you figured out anything useful to share?”

“Unfortunately, no. Both his private quarters and the fairly recently added church are distinct from the tunnel system, far more difficult to access,” Kanaya says. “We’ll see about means to make our way in without provoking further suspicion. In the meantime, please consider ways to keep him absent from these spaces.”

“Well, the fellow does seem to like hunting ptarmigan,” you sigh. “All’s well on my front, by the way. If we had more time… I mean, he does seem quite eager to massacre all pirates, ever, but that’s to be expected, right? I don’t think I’ve run into anything surprising, just confirmation that there is some supernatural shenaniganry afoot, and that we must all be on guard. And Dirk and Roxy have been getting to know all of his weirdly aged slave-people, which is probably depressing for them, but no doubt quite important.”

“No love lost between the stable guys and Dualscar, but they don’t hate him as much as it seems like they could,” Dirk notes. “They’re weird about Jake, too. Though that’s in a kind of normal, expected sorta way. I figure I’m not allowed to stab them, so I won’t.”

“What, precisely, do you mean by ‘weirdly aged’?” Kanaya asks.

“Uh, like, they’re all older than my mother?” you say, shrugging. “Literally, all of them. You’d probably have to see it to believe it, and I know you’ve been avoiding servants, but they’re all…”

“Have you learned any of their names?”

“The kitchens are run by a Miss… Bronya?”

Her brow furrows deeply.

“We’ll be back tomorrow night with any updates. Keep an eye on it, though. How long do you think you’ll be able to draw out the negotiations?”

You smile.

“As long as I like, he said. Though I do think I’ll see about getting the ball rolling, showing him the goods on the _Ascension_ tomorrow, to get him out of the house and really figure out what he’s interested in.”

“An excellent plan. My faith in you is not misplaced, Jake. You’re doing brilliantly.”

Feeling better already, and noting the placement of the sliding granite panel behind the wardrobe through which she and Vriska entered, you see them out, slumping back into your seat with a sigh. No longer one of exhaustion, either.

“Christ,” Dirk says, like he still hasn’t really processed what just happened.

You have, though. The game is afoot in earnest, and you, in your commanding position on the board, are poised to win this thing. You just have to keep reminding yourself of that. You may not be especially good at chess, but this isn't chess, is it? The queen on your gameboard has a long, deadly shamshir on her hip, and she moves on her own, and she thinks you're doing a great job.

There will be no fucking this up.

**Author's Note:**

> Happy [Dirkjake week](https://dirkjakeweekly.tumblr.com/), please enjoy this modestly-authorized-but-unofficial sequel to The Four Kings, the God Thief, and the Black Diamond Pirates by oxfordRoulette. One chapter will be posted... weekly, so stay tuned for that! Title is from the excellent Spotify playlist, [Sea Shanties for Thots.](https://open.spotify.com/playlist/2DsYfCPWDxZtFzHRj9mO4h) If you're just on the edge of your seat, wondering 'what sea shanties does this author like to listen to, and which might conceivably appear in future chapters', look no further than the playlist [MORE Thematically Appropriate Sea Shanties](https://open.spotify.com/playlist/2tRdP7gi41951vI0OfJf0f?si=30odEQTOTV-ViSkeHxNZUA).


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